


The Queen of Epirus

by orphan_account



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 5
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Heavy Angst, Major character death - Freeform, Mental Anguish, Not Happy, Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-27 10:07:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 18
Words: 27,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18193178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Sometimes, the best thing to do is just to walk away.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Re-uploading. Hope I didn't give y'all too much of a scare.

The rotors of the helicopter whirred overhead. The blood in Jey’s ears rushed, drowning out everything else; the voices of her team, the rapid heartbeat pounding in her chest, even the song she herself was humming to try and calm down.

Years had been leading up to this moment. The mansion at home, the guns, the apartment, the academy, the college, everything led to here. To now.

To a helicopter above the middle of dead nowhere, Montana. 

“Are we there yet?” Jey whined. She fiddled anxiously with her seatbelt.

From next to her, Hudson laughed. “You sound like a kid, rook.”

Jey blushed, shoving her hands under her legs to keep them from embarrassing her further. Unfortunately, with them still, her legs started wiggling seemingly of their own accord, proving once again that Jey couldn’t sit still for the life of her.

“Easy there, rookie,” Whitehorse chided. “Be patient. We’re almost there.”

As if on cue, the helicopter passed a massive stone head, carved to look like some weird guy with a man bun- probably Joseph Seed, from the little that Jey knew about him. “Oh fuck, there he is,” Hudson mumbled. Notes of both disdain and some fear resounded in her voice. 

They drew closer, and Jey shuddered under the stone gaze of the statue. Had to be  _ some  _ cult, to construct this monstrosity.

But with the wind whistling against her face, and the fire in her veins persistent, Jey couldn’t think about it. Her mind was consumed only with what was to come.

A compound- a real nasty-looking thing- came into view, and the helicopter began to descend. “10-4, over and out,” Marshal Burke said. Earlier, he’d been arguing with Whitehorse about something or another, and by the sound of it he still wasn’t over it. Then again, Burke was never one to let things go. He wasn’t exactly a forgiving man.

The rotors slowly beat to a halt, and Jey reluctantly unbuckled her seat belt, stepping out of the helicopter. In her mind, she could hear rock music blaring behind her as she made her grand entrance. In reality, however, she was only met with the chirping of crickets and the piercing, dead stares of a dozen cultists.

Filth. Dear God, these people were disgusting. Men’s beards grew unruly, their skin caked with dirt and… blood? The women weren’t much better. Their hair fell, unwashed and stringy, around their shoulders; their eyes were dull, their skin sallow and their bodies emaciated.

Hudson touched her shoulder. “Come on, rook. We have to go.”

Her eyes not leaving the cultists, Jey fell into step beside Hudson, trying to cast away the shivers that this place gave her. It was cold, but more than that- it was eerily lifeless, a strange uncanny valley, the people looking like mannequins or statues even as they moved. Didn’t help that none of them were talking. Not a single word. They just stared and stared. The only sound in that entire night was the strains of Amazing Grace drifting in the air.

When Whitehorse and the Marshal pushed open the doors, it was like they were screaming in that stark silence. Jey felt her eyes drawn, almost subconsciously, to the front of the church, where four people stood. The first, in the front, a man with a powerful body (fully on display; he wasn’t wearing a shirt) and a commanding, insidious presence. Joseph Seed, most likely. The others stood behind him, subtler but still intimidating. A man, tall and scarred, in an Army shirt. A younger man, bearded, with an expression full of darkness. The third, a woman dressed like an angel, with golden hair. She would have been beautiful, if not for the eyes that were glazed with what Jey could only guess was drugs. Jey took an extra moment to examine her, tearing her eyes back to Joseph when he started to spout Biblical shit. She vaguely recognized the verses from her childhood of Sunday schools, but couldn’t quite place them- knowing this guy, probably because he’d made them up. No God would endorse what these people were doing.

Without realizing it, Jey’s gaze drifted back up to the woman.

“Rookie. Rookie!” The Marshal prodded her, and she snapped back to attention. “Cuff this son of a bitch.”

Jey looked into his eyes, which were set in a self-righteous, smug, yet somehow sinister glare. Without thinking twice, she snapped the handcuffs onto the man. He reminded her of those upper-crust, tennis-court, holier-than-thou elitist rich boys she’d been surrounded by for the first eighteen years of her life, except for the small fact that he had an entire congregation of religious zombies following him. 

“God will not let you take me,” he said in a low voice, just above a whisper. Jey ignored him, grabbing his (still naked) shoulder and pushing him out of the church. As he came into the views of his cultists, they came alive. They looked at him like he was the sun, their eyes, their faces glowing.

And then they saw his captors.

Their ecstasy boiled into anger. Shrieks of rage broke out across the compound. Cultists started barreling into Jey, trying to force her off of their idol. She clutched him harder, quickening her pace.

For his part, Joseph just kept that dark, forbidding expression, somehow not fazed by the fact that he was being arrested.

Hudson and Pratt flanked Jey, their guns at the ready. Jey vaguely wondered what had happened to the three people who had been behind Joseph in the church.

Were they different? They hadn’t had the look of the cultists around them.

Another cultist let out a shattering scream of what was either rage or grief. As they approached the helicopter, finally, the emotions of the cultists boiled over. Shots rang through the compound. The Marshal returned fire. Jey sprinted the last few meters to the helicopter and shoved Joseph inside, Hudson grabbing his arm and pulling him into place.

Apparently, the cultists had had enough. They rushed the chopper with no regard to their own safety, scrambling to get inside of it, reaching for Joseph and turning their violent, crazed eyes onto the Deputies. The helicopter lifted off, but that didn’t stop the cultists from clinging on to the helicopter, still attempting to retrieve their lost… deity? Some of them had been calling him ‘the Father’.

Crazy son of a bitch.

Chaos reigned in the helicopter. More cultists than Jey had thought possible climbed on board, kept at bay by rogue gunfire. Another cultist grabbed her arm, and without even considering it, Jey shook her off, sending her plunging down to earth. For a second, she felt sorry for her. But then another cultist came, and another, and another. Nothing existed beyond the shouts from her teammates. Nothing existed beyond the gunfire and the cultists and the blood.

The helicopter spun into the ground, and smoke consumed Jey’s vision, and then nothing existed at all.


	2. Chapter 2

She woke up to a haze of fire and dust and Nancy’s desperate voice from the dangling headset. The world was bathed in orange and a half-conscious heartbeat, and then, slowly forming from a soft voice, those same notes of Amazing Grace.

Jey reached for the headset. Another hand grasped her wrist with a powerful grip.

Joseph Seed leaned in too close to her, crooning the song with a sort of twisted tenderness. She could see why they called him the Father.

He pushed her arm down. Jey surrendered to it. What was he going to do? Call dispatch? They would send in the National Guard. She was trapped, but he was more so.

“I told you that God wouldn’t let you take me,” he whispered.

Maybe God hadn’t let this happen, but God didn’t stand a chance against the Army. Jey smiled weakly. Joseph examined her, eyes knowing and distant, and reached for the headset. Nancy’s voice only got more distraught.

“Dispatch,” Joseph said, his voice strong. “Everything is just fine here. No need to call anyone.”

Jey’s heart stopped.

“Yes, Father. Praise be to you.”   
The world closed in around her.

Joseph pulled Jey closer, his cool, collected gaze meeting her frantic one. “No one is coming to save you.”

With an agility that he shouldn’t have had, Joseph dropped to the ground, going out among his minions like a prophet. The cultists were docile, trained dogs under his hands, and when he began to speak, they surrounded him like children around their- well, their father.

He was saying something about seals, and a collapse, but Jey only knew the sharp pain in her legs and the heaviness in her head. She barely registered Burke’s mumbling of “get out of here, we gotta get out of here.” Just end, just end. God, let it just end.

As if commanded, the cultists rushed the helicopter, reaching for the deputies. Hudson tore at her seatbelt to no avail. Jey reached out to help her, trying to force her voice into use, but found only a rasping cough. She closed her eyes, trying to endure the wave of pressure in her head. Shouts of varying levels of panic turned into shrieks of fear. Jey opened her eyes, and the only person remaining was Marshal Burke. She could only barely hear the voice of Pratt and Hudson in the distance. He pulled himself out of the wreckage with strength born of desperation, and Jey, after taking a final look at the flames bleeding into the helicopter, ripped off her seatbelt and followed him. “Let them burn,” Joseph commanded. “It is God’s will. It is their punishment.”   
Jey gave him a last vindictive glare. She’d get him back. Sooner or later, she’d get him back.

She couldn’t see the Marshal, but at least she knew he was still alive. “They’re getting away!” yelled a cultist from behind her, and letting her instincts kick in, Jey found herself sprinting down an unmarked path. She didn’t know where it led, but anywhere was better than here.

In any other circumstance, the moon would have been serene and gentle. Now, it was like an indifferent observer, lighting her way to a destination she didn’t know. The ground slammed against her shoes. The cold bit and numbed her skin, but the heat of running staved it off.

She vaulted across a river. Her legs were already burning, but the option to quit wasn’t there. A momentary flash of empathy for the Marines brought her some solace. If they could do it, then so could she.

A cabin with warm orange lights came into view. Shelter.

And, at closer observation, cultists. Two of them.

There was cover, but Jey didn’t have time to pussyfoot around. She grabbed a big stick and whistled.

Both of the cultists whirled around. Jey ducked out of the way of their shots, slamming the first one in the face with the stick and tackling the other one, punching him in the stomach until he coughed up blood. Neither of them would be getting up anytime soon. Lucky for her, the one who’d been shooting at her still had a few clips of bullets on him. Dropping the stick and shoving the gun, safety on, into her pants, she leaped into the cabin through a window.

Jey slumped against the wall and let the fire in her legs burn itself out. But it didn’t- couldn’t- last long. Her radio wheezed out a chunk of static, forming into a familiar voice. “Hello? Anyone hearing me?” For a moment, it turned back into static. “It’s Burke. Hello?”

Jey jumped back to her feet and set back on the path, at a steady pace this time. The radio buzzed back in. “I think I lost them. I see a… a trailer nearby. It’s next to a long bridge. I’m gonna try and get inside. Listen, if anyone’s still out there… If anyone’s still alive…”   
His voice blurred back into static. 

Jey glanced around. She had emerged from the dead of the woods, apparently, and there- there was a long bridge. And beyond it, the trailer. “Coming, Burke,” she mumbled to herself.

She took off running again, trying her best to ignore the unstable wobbling of the bridge under her weight. The trailer drew closer, and with it, a hope for salvation. 

She eased herself back onto solid land, pulling out the gun and glancing around for any cultists. Seeing none, she entered the trailer, shutting the door behind her.

Marshal Burke. She’d never thought that the sight of his face would bring so much relief. He, however, didn’t seem to feel the same way, since he launched himself at her, trying to shove her to the ground. It took him a second to recognize her face. When he did, he let go. “Oh, Jesus Christ… Rook, I’m sorry. I thought they got you…” He gestured for her to follow him out of a door. “Come on, come on. Check the room, Rook.”   
Jey looked inside, but it was just an abandoned bedroom, its curtains flapping in the wind. Not a cultist in sight. “Clear.”

The inside of the trailer was rough, but mostly intact. A spray of glass from a shattered window lay across the floor. The Marshal moved with a paranoid caution to his steps. When he had confirmed that the place was safe, he relaxed, but only marginally. “Fuck! I had no idea.” He turned around, checking and rechecking the trailer. With a violent motion, he tore a portrait- of the same four people from the church, posed against each other in a strangely Victorian manner-  from the wall, throwing it down onto a table. “We’re putting this whole family away. All of ‘em. Fucking lunatics!”

Jey stared down at it, her eyes still inadvertently being drawn to the woman. Joseph’s sister. “How about we get the hell out of here first?”   
Marshal Burke didn’t seem to notice that she’d said anything. He was too caught up in furiously pacing around the room, grabbing anything that seemed useful. Somewhere in the trailer, he’d found an assault rifle, and was turning it in his hands, peering down the scope, checking if it was still useful. “We’re gonna get out of here, Rookie. First, we gotta arm ourselves.” He pushed the gun into Jey’s hands, and she swung it over her shoulder by its strap. The handgun was still uncomfortably shoved into her pants, and she adjusted it to no avail. First priority, once they got back to civilization: get a damn holster. She had thought she wouldn’t need one. This was supposed to be pick-up-and-go, in-and-out. Her first assignment out of college, and this was where she ended up- behind enemy lines in her own country.

Picking up another handgun, the Marshal looked out another window. “There. See that road? We’re gonna take it, we’re gonna head northeast. It’s probably only a few hours to Missoula. And then we’re going to come back with the goddamn National Guard, and we’re gonna take care of the rest of these-”

A rough voice yelled outside. “Came around this way! Check inside the trailers!”   
Jey aimed her gun at the rough source of the sound, ready for a firefight, but Burke hushed her and pointed toward the window. Outside, a horde of cultists was investigating. How the hell did some no-name in the middle of Montana get this many followers? These types of people were easy to manipulate, sure- Jey knew that from experience- but there shouldn’t have been this many people here anyway. Made the whole cult business that much creepier.

She didn’t waste time in sending out a barrage of bullets. A few of the cultists fell, but more arrived to take their places. From his position at the other window, Burke yelled abuse at them, taking shots with trained precision. 

For her part, Jey fired wildly at any exposed flesh she saw. Burke jumped out of the window, Jey following practically unconsciously, and when he got into a white truck emblazoned with the cultist symbol, Jey was quick to accompany him. Leaning out of the car window and letting out a steady rate of fire, a rush of adrenaline thrummed down her arms and into her chest. Jey screamed in a mix of rage, terror, and pure, ecstatic joy. “Take that, you blasphemin’ pissbabies!”

Burke plowed through cultists, trees, and gates alike. He kept a steady commentary about “fuckin’ Nancy” and “can’t know who to trust” and some other stuff that got lost in the gunfire. Jey swiveled around to face forward just in time to see a red flare shoot into the sky.

Yeah, right. Call for support. There couldn’t possibly be any more of them.

Burke exploded through a roadblock. At least five cars were hot on their heels at this point, but by some God-given stroke of luck, their truck was still going strong.

A bullet clipped her in the shoulder.

“Oh my God, is that a plane? Don’t tell me they have fucking air support!” Burke yelled.

Like a monolith, the plane rose into Jey’s vision and started strafing like there was no tomorrow. “Holy shit,” Jey murmured, frozen in place. Another bullet lodged in her collar, and then another in her chest. The world started fading. She still couldn’t move.

Burke looked away from the road long enough to yank her back into the truck. “Fucking hell, Rook, you trying to get yourself killed?”   
She mumbled something even she couldn’t understand. They were on the bridge now, a real one, with supports and everything.

“Oh shit! Incoming!”   
Heat slammed into her face. The car plunged into empty air, sending her stomach flying. Water filled the car in a split second, and for the second time that night, Jey’s consciousness faded back to darkness.


	3. Chapter 3

Given the fact that Jey’s hands were ziptied to a bed frame, a radio droning out more of Joseph’s religious drivel in the background, she could guess that this wasn’t the afterlife.

And if it was, she hadn’t expected God to be a bald white guy in a camo jacket that proudly sported “USA” on the left pocket.

“You know what this shit means?” he demanded, a stark figure against the concrete wall. “It means the roads have all been closed. It means the phone lines have been cut.” He approached her, sitting down in front of the bed she’d been tied to. “It means there’s no signals getting in or out of this valley.” He leaned in, fixing her with a piercing glare, his eyes alarmingly sharp and alert for a man his age. Jey tried to pull away, but the ties stopped her. “But mostly, it means we’re all fucked.”

He looked away, the odd fluorescent light in wherever the hell he’d taken her illuminating the worn planes of his face. “The goddamn Collapse… they all think the world’s coming to an end, now. They’ve been waiting for it for years. Waiting for somebody to come along and fulfill their prophecy. Kick off their goddamn holy war.” The tone of his voice grew more and more accusatory as he continued to rant. He was a nut, obviously, but at least he wasn’t a cultist. And he hadn’t killed her yet, so points for him. “Well, you sure as shit kicked…”

Jey tugged at her ties again. “Uh… sorry?”   
“Sorry?” the man snapped, pulling closer to her. “You just screwed us all, and you’re sorry?” He let out a deep sigh. “You know, the smartest thing for me to do would just be to hand you over.”

“Please don’t do that,” Jey said softly.

The man sighed again. “Fuck…” He pulled out a wicked-looking hunting knife, fingering it for a moment, before leaning down and cutting her ties. He rose before Jey had a chance to pull back. “Get out of that uniform. We need to burn it.” He pointed to a closet. “There’s some fresh clothes there. When you get changed, you come and see me. We’ll see if we can un-fuck this situation.”

With those words, he left the room. Jey pulled the remnants of her zipties off of her wrists. 

Well, she was in some kind of bunker with an old nutjob who hadn’t killed her yet, in the middle of the territory of a psychotic cult, with no one coming for her. That was somewhere she’d never thought she’d be.

Jey examined the contents of the closet, pulling out a red-and-black shirt that looked about her size. At least she had flannel. That was a glimmer of hope.

She pulled on a pair of brown pants that, miraculously, were also comfortable. Then, just for good measure, she wrapped a mysterious little scarf patterned like the American flag around her neck. Who knew what this old guy was doing with something like that in his closet. Really, though, Jey was past caring. And she had a feeling she would need the extra warmth.

Now, all she needed to do was find the guy.

For some paranoid old man in the middle of Montana, his bunker was remarkably large and well-equipped. Jey even had some trouble tracking down the room that he was in. Moving boxes, buckets, and bags of rice crowded the floor, but Jey had to appreciate the safety of the bunker. It made her feel like sleeping.

Eventually, she found a room tinted with reddish light, the man leaning tiredly on a desk loaded with old TVs. She adjusted the collar of her flannel, shifting from foot to foot until he noticed her.

“I didn’t properly introduce myself back there,” he started. “Most folks call me Dutch. I’ve been trying to piece together what’s happenin’ up top… it ain’t good. Little I can gather is that your partners are alive. For now.”   
Jey’s heart clutched. Alive. Alive was good. But the fact that it had to be confirmed… that her friends dying was even an option… 

Dutch continued, oblivious to her pained expression. Or maybe, more likely, just numb to it all. “Seems they’ve been split up… each one handed off to a different member of Joseph’s family.” He must have seen Jey’s wide eyes, because his next words were softer. “You want ‘em back. I get it- I got friends that’ve been taken, too. Problem is, there ain’t no help coming. Nobody knows what’s going on here, and they won’t know until it’s too late.”

A shiver shot down Jey’s spine. What, exactly, did the phrase ‘too late’ mean?

Dutch plowed on. “There’s gotta be people out there willing to fight back against this cult. We just need to show ‘em how. We need to build us a resistance.”   
“I can build a resistance,” Jey immediately replied.

That, at least, brought some semblance of amused exasperation into Dutch’s expression. “How do you think to do that?”   
“Hand out pamphlets?” Jey guessed.

Dutch shook his head. “They’d murder you, kid. You’re the cult’s most wanted.”

Jey bounced on her toes. “Then tell me what to do.” 

Just moments ago, she had wanted to lie down and sleep for days. Now, there was a fire in her blood. Three parts of her heart lay in three different regions, controlled by three different evils, and Jey wouldn’t be able to sleep until all three were back to her.

Dutch pointed to a safe. “There’s a gun and a map in there. Take ‘em. I’ll call you on your radio once you get your bearings.”

Jey opened it with little difficulty. Somewhere along the way, the gun she’d had in her pants must have slipped out. Now that she was thinking about it, a long stripe of throbbing pain made itself known on her left leg. It hadn’t fallen. She had been dragged, and the friction had coaxed the gun out.

With that realization, a flash of memory from the car crash came back. The plane, the bomb, the river, and then Joseph’s voice echoing through the night. 

Jey shivered and pulled the handgun out of the safe, folding the map and tucking it into her pocket. “You wouldn’t happen to have a holster around here somewhere, would you?”

Dutch gave her a curious look, then pulled one out from under his desk, because of course he had one under his desk. “Go and give ‘em hell.”

Jey affixed the holster to her belt and put the gun in it. Last night would not be a repeat performance. Dutch didn’t give her a word of goodbye, but hey, it was the apocalypse, wasn’t it? Or something like that.

It took a bit of searching to find the exit- a hatch on the ceiling. Quintessential doomsday. As she pushed it open, light flooded her eyes and forced them shut. Somehow, in the endless hours that had passed between the helicopter landing and waking up here, the sun had risen. It didn’t even look like morning. More like afternoon. 

The radio buzzed. “Now listen up- if you’re gonna build a resistance, there’s some things you need to know. There’s four ways you can go about this. First, you can liberate any hostages the cult has taken. These are good people, who might just fight alongside you if you help ‘em. Second, you can destroy Eden’s Gate property that’s all over the place now. Hell, they’ve built two goddamn shrines on this island alone. Third, you can tackle resistance missions. There are a lot of folks out there waging their own war against this cult, and they could sure use your help. And last, if you’re really looking for a fight, you can take on the cult outposts that have popped up across the county. Liberating those places will give the resistance solid footholds to push back against Eden’s Gate.”

Jey sighed. “I thought you were going to wait for me to get my bearings.”

“Cult isn’t waiting, so neither should you. Get movin’, Deputy.”

She snapped the radio back onto her belt. Indistinct murmurs of cultists humming along to creepy little hymns, the distant roll of tires. Follow the sounds and kill their sources. Simple task.

Last midnight, this would have been a horrifying thought. It was horrifying, all right, but this was reality. And if Jey wanted to survive, she had better learn quick.

Frankly, she didn’t know shit about anything at the moment. Not where her friends were, not who was holding them. Hell, she still didn’t know the names of Joseph’s three siblings. But who needed plans? Action was always more effective.

Jey faced where the sounds came from, and with heavy, military steps, she began to trace them to their sources.

They had given her a hell on earth, so she would send them right back to the real one.


	4. Chapter 4

The Peggies, as she had learned they were called, packed one hell of a punch.

Of course, it was mostly her fault. She’d somehow managed to forget the small detail that she had been shot. Twice. In the chest. And clipped in the shoulder.

So this victory was surprising.

The shrines had been easy targets, really; a couple of long-range bullets to the weird tank in the middle of the structure, and boom. Literally. Who in their right mind would stand that close to an massive explosion just waiting to happen? Well, ‘right mind’ made that statement inapplicable to the cultists in the first place. So there really wasn’t much to be found in asking.

Jey sighed, peering down at the blood seeping through the bandages that Dutch must have applied. At this point, pain barely even registered.

Maybe going into a little ranger station swarming with armed freaks, guns blazing, hadn’t been a very good idea.

But hey. Wounds aside, she’d still won.

Her radio buzzed. “Holy shit, rookie.”

Smiling, lightheaded, Jey pulled the radio off of her belt and answered. “Almost sounds like you didn’t expect me to get through that.”   
“You shouldn’t’ve,” Dutch replied. “You did good, kid. But there’s a whole county out there you need to save. You’ll get yourself killed going at this rate.”

Jey glanced down at the blood still spreading across her abdomen and decided not to respond.

“Anyway, I got more news for you. Your partner Hudson’s in Holland Valley with John Seed. Sleazy guy. He’s a lawyer, helped the cult get all their land. He’s taking all the food for the cult. People are starving. I’d go there if I were you. Liberate Fall’s End. That’s the only sort of town around these parts, and there’s good people there.”

“What about Pratt and Whitehorse?” Jey immediately asked.

“Pratt’s with Jacob up north, in the Whitetail Mountains. Jacob’s the older brother, soldier of the bunch. Trains up the new recruits. Scary guy. I’ve heard he conditions them with music or something like that. And Whitehorse is with Faith in the Henbane River. That woman’s bad news. She seems innocent, but don’t trust a single thing she says. Her whole shtick is manipulation. Got that?”   
“Got it. Thanks, Dutch,” Jey responded. She eased herself onto her feet, feeling the stitches along her wounds tighten with the movement. It was a miracle that they hadn’t ripped. She’d seen a dock along the coast of the island; there should be some kind of boat there, if she was lucky. She had to get to Hudson first. Hudson could take care of herself, but Jey would freely admit that she worried about her more than the others. Hudson had been her mentor and ally, like the big sister she’d always wanted, and if any harm came to her, it would sting. Besides, John Seed sounded like a real piece of work. Starving out innocent people for the sake of his psycho cult.

She finally knew their names. She finally had something to aim for.

Her radio sounded again. “One more thing. You’re gonna take on the Seeds, you’ll need help. There’s people around Hope County who got special skills. You’ll find ‘em all right, but you wanna kill two birds with one stone, I got a proposal. My niece Jess, I haven’t heard from her in a while. She’s good with a bow. Might be handy to have her with you. You’ll most likely find her at Baron Lumber Mill, in Jacob’s region. Dutch out.”

Jey sighed. A little more firepower would probably go a long way. Leaning against the wall of the station she’d just liberated, she breathed for a minute, praying for the pain to go away.

Jacob’s region. North of here. She took the map out of her pocket- it was slightly torn, and old, but still readable. The lumber mill was quite a while away, by the looks of it. She’d need a vehicle.

The docks were a good place to start. Jey pocketed the map again and headed out.

\--

Night fell before she reached her destination. How was getting across a county so difficult? She’d been lucky to find a boat, and luckier to find an abandoned cult truck sitting on the side of the road, but still- every five minutes, some other distraction came along. She’d have considered taking a break and resting a while, but the lumber mill was <i>right there</i>. She couldn’t give up now.

There it was, in the near distance. At least, there was something that looked like a lumber mill.

She eased the car into a stop.

“...empires always crumble. This is our final warning. This…” The uncannily clear sound of a broadcasted speech surrounded the lumber mill. Jey tuned it out almost immediately. She had things to do- didn’t need to listen to some old psycho blabber about the Collapse.

At first, it didn’t look like there was anyone in the structure, but after a few moments of waiting next to the truck, a cultist made his appearance. He squinted at Jey. “Has Brother Jacob sent you, sister?”   
“Sort of,” Jey replied, pulling out her pistol. “Hey, hold still a second. Brother Jacob’s got a message for you.”   
The cultist seemed much more surprised that he should have been when she shot him in the chest.

Unfortunately for her, the gunshots echoed through the whole building. A horde of cultists- had to be nine or ten of them- exploded out of the mill, screaming bloody murder. In the periphery of her vision, the red light of a sniper’s scope swept across the scene.

“Ah, shit.” Jey ducked behind the truck. Once again, running in guns blazing had proven not to be a good idea. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected.

Peering down the too-short barrel of her gun, she fired off two quick shots in the direction of the sniper. By some miracle, one of them hit, the impact sending the sniper careening off the edge of their perch. 

That removed the immediate threat, but there were still about nine pissed-off cultists seconds away from engaging. Jey slid under the truck and held her breath.

Seven pairs of feet appeared around the car just as soon as she’d fully slid underneath. “Where’d she go?”   
·Jey fired a line of bullets into every foot she saw. Nearly simultaneously, a chorus of screams and pained moans erupted from the cultists. “Morons.”

She extracted herself back out from under the car and finished off the two cultists who had approached, bewildered, to their fallen comrades. She smiled apologetically at the ones who were still alive. “Sorry. Girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

She plucked a rifle off of one of their bodies and swung it over her shoulder, adding the clips they were carrying to her overstuffed pant pockets. One lesson she was quickly learning was that you could never have too much ammunition.

With the cultists out of the way, all she had to do now was find that girl. Dutch’s niece. But this place was-

A sudden pain pierced into her. Too slim to be another bullet. Jey reached around, feeling for the source, and came across a long wooden shaft sticking out of the dead center of her left buttcheek. Grimacing, she pulled it out. “Wow.” 

Turning around, she met the dark blue eyes of a hooded figure, staring at her from a distance. Jey brandished the arrow. “What is this, the 1600s?”

“Who the fuck are you?” the figure yelled back.

Jey advanced. “Shoot first, ask questions later, huh? Tell your Father he’s a real gentleman.”   
“I’m not a fuckin’ Peggie!” The figure faltered, taking a few steps forward. “Wait, you’re not a Peggie?”

<i>Good with a bow.</i> Dutch’s words echoed in Jey’s ears. She let out a laugh. “Your name wouldn’t happen to be Jess, would it?”   
The figure nocked another arrow at those words. “How the fuck you you know that?”   
“I-” Jey had to keep herself from laughing again at the sheer absurdity of the situation. “I’m Deputy Clark. Your uncle sent me. Please don’t shoot me again.”   
Hesitantly, Jess lowered her bow, assessing Jey from head to toe. Jey was finally close enough to make out some of the other woman’s features from under the hood. She didn’t bear much of a resemblance to Dutch. Surprisingly pretty, too; chestnut-blonde hair, fair skin marred by a multitude of nasty scars, eyes dark blue.

For a second, a sharp familiarity flashed in Jey’s chest. The eyes. The scars. Just like Aleksandrov.

She quickly brushed the thought of her old partner away. Now wasn’t the time.

After what felt like an hour of standing there, eyeing each other up and down, Jess broke the stalemate. “Fuck it. I need your help.”

“With what?”   
“I was on the trail of one of Jacob’s zealots. Goes by the name ‘the Cook.’ I know it don’t sound that scary, but…” She glanced at the ground. “Believe me, he’s one twisted fuck. Almost tracked him down, but a Peggie patrol got the drop on me. I can’t let this trail go cold.”

“Got the drop on you?” Jey asked. “You got captured? Then how did you-”

“Look, can we get going?” Jess interrupted. “He’s high up in the cult. It’ll piss off Jacob. But we gotta go <i>now</i> if we wanna catch up to him. Just follow me.”

With those words, Jess immediately broke into a jog. Jey was quick to follow. In silence, they crested a hill, Jess’s quick movements and over-alert eyes the telltale flags of someone who had been on the run far too long, until another structure slowly came into view.

“<i>There,</i>” Jess whispered reverently. “That’s where that motherfucker is going to die.”   
Before Jey could even draw her gun, Jess had put arrows through the eyes of four of the cultists patrolling below her. Jey watched in amazement as one by one, arrow by arrow, the rest of the guards dropped dead.

It was only when Jess’s scope swept over a man with a flamethrower that her hand trembled in hesitation. “Sick fuck,” she murmured. But still, the arrow wouldn’t loose.

Jey took aim, waited for the man to expose the explosive fuel tank on his back, and fired three times in quick succession. The tank exploded into a firework of gore, smoke, and orange flame, lighting up the night, and Jess’s hand relaxed. She swung her bow over her back, stance marginally less heavy than it had been before. “Thanks.”

Jey smiled tentatively. “Uh, no problem.”

“Anyway, what’d you need my help with?” Jess asked. 

Some aspect of her remained distant- this mission probably meant more to her than she had let on, but Jey would be damned if she tried to squeeze information out of someone who had shot her in the ass not an hour ago. “Just... in general. I need your help in general.”

Jess raised her eyebrows.

“I’m trying to take down the cult, okay? Dutch said you’d be a good person to do that with.” Jey anxiously bounced on her feet. “You in?”

“Got nothing better to do,” Jess answered. “Where are we going?”   
Jey’s radio suddenly burst into static. “Hello? Anyone? It’s Mary May, down at Fall’s End. The Peggies got control of the town. If anyone’s out there, please-” The voice cut off into a scream, then the radio fell silent.

“Well, that sounds like a good place to start.”


	5. Chapter 5

Using cult trucks to get around was now a thing of the past.

Upon seeing it, Jey had insisted that they pull over, despite Jess’s irritated protests. And, since she’d seen no one around to claim it…

Well, Jey now owned the most magnificent red truck she had ever seen.

And now she was almost vibrating with joy in the front seat. “What should we call her? Bloody Mary? Pepperoni? Strawberry Fire?”

“It’s a fuckin’ car,” Jess grumbled.

Jey wiggled the steering wheel. These empty roads were a blessing sometimes. “She’s a truck, not just a car. She needs a name.”   
Jess thought about it for a second, her gaze remaining firmly locked on the outside surroundings. “The Mangler.”   
Jey laughed. “That’s dark.”

Jess didn’t offer any further comment, so Jey settled further into her seat. Crazy, how comfortable this thing was. It was practically pristine- couldn’t have been more than a few years old.

The mountains became less tall as they headed southwest. Forty-five minutes passed before they came to the bridge that Jey remembered from her wild escape with Marshal Burke, and only a few more before a dusty scattering of buildings became visible on the horizon.

“That’s Fall’s End,” Jess said.

Jey looked to her, but the huntress remained taciturn. “Let’s go take it back, then.”

After parking the truck a safe distance away, Jey headed into the town, the shotgun that she’d looted off a cultist slung over her shoulder. It was almost scary, how easily she’d adjusted to carrying such heavy weapons. Then again, the cult wasn’t exactly light on arms. How they’d managed to get so many guns so easily was beyond her.

Maybe America actually should have some kind of gun control.

For it being the only trace of civilization for miles, and supposedly an important holding for the cult, there were only a few Peggies roaming around the town. Jey readied her shotgun and prepared to shed first blood.

Without waiting to be directed, Jess darted into the grass. Right- bows were supposed to be stealthy weapons. Not exactly inclined for a guns-out, firefight approach. Still, considering that Jey was armed only with an unsilenced shotgun… the options were limited.

Noting Jess’s position, Jey moved to the other side of the town. Two lines of old buildings; that was all they had to take.

She waited for Jess to take the first shot, felling a Peggie and dragging him into the bushes, before she threw a rock into the middle of the town, drawing multiple cultists toward it with worried mumbles.

Then, thanking God that she had thought to load the car up with useful items, Jey threw a Molotov. Three cultists lit on fire at the same time, screaming like demons. “Nice to meet y’all!” Jey shouted at them cheerfully, stepping into the arena of the town with a bright smile. 

Another one of Jess’s arrows sent a sniper’s body sliding down the roof. How the hell did that girl have such good aim?

“Clear?” Jey yelled, just as another Peggie barreled out of a store and toward her. A single powerful burst of bullets from the shotgun dealt with him. “Apparently not.”

Another four came out of the church, too shocked to fire when they saw Jey standing casually in the middle of the town. Jess’s arrows got two of them, Jey’s bullets the rest. 

Jess materialized by Jey’s side again, brushing off her pants. “Fuckin’ Peggies,” she muttered. She gave Jey a look that managed to combine irritation, cynicism, and grudging respect into one. “We should find Mary May and Pastor Jerome. They’re the backbone of this town.” Jess looked back at the ground, a tiny glint of fear flashing behind her eyes. “If the fuckin’ cult got to ‘em…”

Jey caught sight of a woman struggling against her bonds. “Hey, Jess- is that Mary May?”   
Jess looked up and pretended not to be relieved, running over and slashing the cuffs binding the woman to a fencepost, yet wincing when the woman touched her shoulder in gratitude. The two exchanged a few words that Jey couldn’t hear. Frankly, she was nervous to approach them. Jess didn’t look like she was messing around. Then again, did she ever?

Eventually, though, Jess drew away from the woman with a surprisingly red face. After wondering about the weird expression for a second, a slow smile spread across Jey’s face. At least she wasn’t alone in <i>that</i> regard. She trotted over to the woman, who pulled herself into a stand, rubbing her wrists. “Nice to meet you! You’re Mary May, right?” Jey stuck out her hand. “I’m Deputy Jane-Marie Clark. You can call me Jey for short.”

Mary May took her hand with no hesitation, shaking it warmly. “Mary May Fairgrave. I run the Spread Eagle. Thanks for saving our asses, Deputy.”

“It’s what I’ve been doing a lot of these days,” Jey replied, releasing Mary May’s hand. “I gotta say, it’s a relief to finally meet someone who’s not… uh, you know.” She tilted her head to Jess.

Mary May laughed. “Oh, don’t let her scare you. She may be a bit rough around the edges, but I promise she’ll warm up to you eventually.”

“I know the type,” Jey said, shaking her head good-naturedly. “My old partner was the same way.” 

Jess, who had apparently disappeared again, returned with a man in pastor’s clothes in tow. “Found Pastor Jerome,” she said curtly.

The pastor looked at her, and something like hope came across his face. “The Junior Deputy,” he said reverently. “God be praised.”

Jey smiled. “Pleased to meet you, Reverend.”

He clapped her on the shoulder. “We have a lot of work for you.”


	6. Chapter 6

Jey kicked open the crate. “I think he’s a blue heeler,” she mused.

“I think he’s more trouble than he’s worth,” Jess shot back immediately, wiping her bloodied hands on her hoodie.

Boomer barked and trotted up to Jess, wagging his tail and sniffing her. She glared at him, which he seemed to interpret as a friendly gesture, because he rolled over on her shoes and waited to get a belly rub.

Jess groaned, but still leaned over and pet him. “I don’t get why Mary May had us go and get this stupid mutt.”   
“Probably for morale. Besides, he comes with the pumpkin farm. It’s a good territory to have,” Jey said absently, clapping her hands to coax the dog to her. He jumped up, much to Jess’s obvious relief, and licked Jey’s outstretched hand. “Who’s a good boy?” she cooed, scratching behind his ears much to his delight. “Aww, you’re such a good boy. What a handsome scarf!” She turned to Jess with starry eyes, tugging out her own scarf. “Look, we match!”

Jess sighed. “How about we get him in the car?”   
Jey whistled for him, opening the door to the truck. “In you go, boy!”

He hesitated, looking to the house he was leaving behind. Instead of jumping into the truck, he padded into the yard, sitting down and whining softly.

Jey hopped the fence. Upon seeing the scene, her smile drained away.

Boomer sat, dejected and quietly crying, over the bodies of two people lying in puddles of their own blood.

His parents.

Jey’s heart clutched.

“Hey, baby boy,” she said gently. “I’m sorry.”

Boomer whined again. Jey ran a hand down his back in soothing strokes. “It’s okay, sweetie. You’re okay. Everything’s going to be okay, I promise.”

He gave her a last stood up and walked back to Jess, who ushered him into the car. Despite her general rough attitude, Jey could still see the huntress surreptitiously pat the dog on the head before shutting the door.

Jey made the sign of the cross for Boomer’s parents before she went to join him in the truck. Jess had already gotten into the passenger seat.

Just as Jey got into her seat, giving Boomer one last scratch behind the ears before starting off, her radio buzzed. “<i>Dep-yoo-tee.</i> I see you’ve taken the dog.”   
She pulled her radio off of her belt. “Is this the little bitch who killed Boomer’s parents?”

“It’s John Seed,” he answered. Jey tried not to feel too smug at the obvious irritation in his voice. “And you are making a mistake. You cannot resist us. You are one woman, and we are an army. But you are not beyond salvation. Confess your sins, and all will be forgiven. All you have to do is say <i>yes</i>.” He chuckled. “My people are coming for you, Deputy. Don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.”

Well, that was a villain monologue that was begging to be destroyed. Jey called him back. “You know my name’s Jey, right? Why do you keep calling me ‘Deputy’?”

He didn’t respond. She called him again. “Hey John, what’s smarmy, has a nasty beard, and is getting arrested very soon?”

Again, her radio stayed silent, so she answered her own question. “It’s you. I’m going to arrest you.”

After a good, long moment, he finally responded. “Watch your back, <i>Deputy</i>.”

“What a piece of crap,” Jey said to herself, affixing the radio back to her belt. She glanced over at the passenger seat, and to her delight, Jess was holding back a laugh. 

She didn’t have the time to savor it: Dutch’s voice came through the radio almost as soon as she’d put the radio back. “Kid, he wasn’t joking about his people coming for you. Capture parties are gonna be trailin’ you for as long as you stay in the Valley. You better lay low for a while.”

“Roger that, Dutch,” Jey answered.

A bullet exploded through the window and hit her in the shoulder.

As the world faded to white around her, she managed a solitary “shit”.

\--

Jey woke up with a moan. Memories of the past night flashed through her mind in bits and pieces. Jerome breaking open the truck… the security gate… liberating Merle… the mortar and the helicopter. And then the mad dash through Holland Valley, gathering the injured before the cult could get to them. Above her, the high, angled ceiling of the Fall’s End church soared.

A throbbing ache in her shoulder, presumably from the bullet that had led to her capture, confirmed that it hadn’t been a dream.

“What the hell…” she rasped.

She was given no warning before a stream of liquid fire poured into the bullet wound. “Agh- fuck!” Her eyes squeezed shut at the pain. If she hadn’t been fully conscious beforehand, she sure as hell was now.

The faces of Jess and Mary May were there to greet her when she finally blinked her eyes open again. “Hey there, Deputy,” Mary May said with a smile. “You were a hell of a hero last night.”   
“Since when are you a doctor?” Jey complained, rubbing the wound on her arm that only seemed to get more painful as time went on. “And where were <i>you</i> last night?” she asked, tilting her head to Jess.

Jess scoffed. “Out lookin’ for you. They knocked me out too. Didn’t bother taking me, though. Guess I’m beyond saving.” Her tone balanced between pride and something distinctly its opposite. 

Jey sighed. The pain was starting to recede, and with it, her temper. “Sorry. I guess I don’t take too well to the whole heroism thing.”   
“Well, that’s too bad,” Mary May said, looking more amused than empathetic. “Because if you want to keep on fighting the cult, you have to keep doing it.”

“You got their attention now,” Jess added. “You just gotta keep it.”   
Mary May kneeled down, producing a roll of bandages and wrapping Jey’s shoulder. That marked the third gunshot wound of this little adventure. 

She sighed and submitted to the treatment. “Where should I start?”   
Mary May thought about it for a moment, her hands slowing down briefly. “I haven’t heard much from the Ryes recently. You might want to check that out.” She shook her head. “If those Peggie bastards hurt Kim…”

Jess laid a tentative hand on Mary May’s shoulder. 

“We’ll check it out,” Jey assured her, giving Jess a knowing look.

Suddenly, Jess startled. “Fuck- the dog! I don’t have the fucking dog!”

Jey blanched. “You lost Boomer?”   
A bark at the door of the church said otherwise.

Mary May laughed. “He must have followed your scent.” 

Jess swung open the doors, and sure enough, the dog bounded up to Jey, licking her face until she shoved him away with a laugh. “Hey, Mayflower, where’s Pastor Jerome? I wanna thank him for… you know, the rescue.”

Mary May shook her head fondly. “He meant to wait for you to wake up, but you know him. God’s calling and all that. He can’t sit still for a moment.” She tied off the bandage and stepped back. “You should go. I’ll tell him you said thanks.”

Jey swung her legs off of the pew, gingerly touching her newly-bandaged wound. “Okay. I’ll come back as soon as I can, yeah?”

“Counting on it,” Mary May replied, patting her on the back. “Now get going, tiger.”   
The second she was out of the church, Jey’s radio sounded again. “You refuse to come into the flock. You refuse to say <i>yes.</i> But that doesn’t matter. You are nothing but a sinner, and one way or another, you will be dealt with. You refuse to be converted, so you will be killed.”   
“Come and get me yourself,” Jey challenged into the radio.

To her surprise, he let out a dry laugh. “Believe me, I’m tempted. But you are below me.”   
Jey wanted to throw the radio to the ground. Instead, she looked at Jess with a wild grin. “Let’s give this asshole a run for his money.”


	7. Chapter 7

The drive to Rye and Sons Aviation was filled with a silence only slightly more comfortable than the one that had accompanied them to Fall’s End. Jey had tried to thank Jess for bringing her red truck back to her, but Jess had just brushed it off. For his part, Boomer was lying in the back seat, panting.

Things had slowed down. Sure, they were still taking down Peggies right and left, but there was none of the insanity that had accompanied her for the first few days. But with slowness came nostalgia. Now that she had the time to think about it, Jey was beginning to miss home. She missed the normality of it. At home, resources were the click of a button away. At home, she had friends. She could even date, if she wanted. It was a world away from what she knew here.

The adrenaline distracted her. She could use a distraction right about now.

And, seeing as they were pulling up to yet another firefight, it looked like that was soon to come.

Jey ducked behind a stack of crates, firing blindly at the cultists sieging what looked like a hangar of some kind.

For mindless, crazy religious lackeys of a psychopath, the Peggies took note of her presence fast, and responded faster. “Deputy!” one of them screamed. “It’s the Deputy!”   
Jey shot toward him, and he fell silent. Jess’s arrows stole the lives of the cultists out from under them, and Jey finished off the survivors.

She jumped on top of the stack of crates, watching for any movement from the men lying on the ground.

A cold cylinder of metal poked into the small of her back. “Turn ‘round now,” said a voice that, while distinctly Southern, did not sound like the rough shouting of the cultists.

Jey raised her hands above her head, slowly turning to face the owner of the gun. “Don’t shoot,” she said, the statement more a question.

Before she saw the face of the man who was aiming at her, Boomer leaped out of the car, wagging his tail and whining happily. 

The gun fell away, back into the hands of a man wearing sunglasses. Opaque, shiny sunglasses, not like the half-assed yellow ones that Joseph Seed flaunted all over the place. The man looked scruffy, to an extent, his hair rough and uncut, but not dirty at all. Not like the cultists. And his beard was maintained, not disgusting.

He noticed her hygiene just as she noticed his. He holstered his gun, reaching down to pet the dog. “Well, I’ll be damned! Are you the Deputy?”

Jey jumped off of the crates, facing the man on level ground. “That depends. Are you Nick Rye?”   
He grinned. It was a nice smile- he looked youthful, with some of the lines carved into his face by stress weakening. “That’s me, partner! Listen, I know we just met and all, but I gotta skip the chit-chat. I’m a pilot, see? And the damn cult took my plane, and seeing as I got a pregnant wife and all that, I can’t go and fetch her myself. You think you could?”

Jey shrugged. “Nothin’ out of the ordinary, I guess. Where are they keeping her?” She pulled out her map. “Just show me where to go.”   
Nick pointed at the lowest point in Holland Valley. “You see this right here? That’s Seed Ranch. John Seed’s home. You grab the plane and bring her back to me, all right?”   
Jey smiled, tucking the map back into her pocket. “I’ve got your back.”   
Jess materialized next to her from God-knows-where. “Where’re we going?” She caught sight of Nick and cringed for an instant before settling into a faux-relaxed stance. “Hey, Nick.”

For his part, Nick lit up. “Jessica Black! Great to see you, kid!” With no hesitation whatsoever, he pulled Jess into what looked to be a crushing hug. The utter humiliation on her face was almost enough to make Jey burst out laughing. The huntress looked like a coyote who had been bathed by an unsuspecting housewife.

Finally, Jess managed to squirm her way out of Nick’s grasp, shaking out her hair as if she could regain some of her lost dignity. “...Nice to see you too.”

“Kim!” Nick hollered across the airfield. “Hey, Kim, come see who’s outside!”   
He waited a few moments before yelling again. “Kim?”   
“I’m here, I’m here,” a woman panted, jogging her way to his side. “Nick, you really have to stop making me run like this.” She looked up, and immediately, her face lit up just like Nick’s had. “Jessica Black!”

For the second time in the space of three minutes, Jess was enveloped in a hug, and she looked only slightly less disgusted at this one. Kim finally let her go. “We were worried about you!”   
Jess mumbled something incoherent, scuffing her boot in the dirt like a kid. Jey patted her on the shoulder and smiled at the Ryes. “I think we’d better get going.”   
“Oh, you must be the Deputy!” Kim said, turning her gaze to Jey. “Thank you for helping us.” Once again with no warning, the woman wrapped her arms around Jey. Man, this family really was a hugging one, weren’t they? Jey returned it promptly. She might not actually know these people, but you could never get too many hugs. 

Boomer whined, and Nick kneeled down, scratching the dog on his back. Boomer immediately flopped over, basking in the attention.

When Kim released her, Jey found that she was smiling- really smiling- for the first time in a while. “I’ll see you two in a bit.”

“Good luck, partner,” Nick added. 

Jey nodded brightly to him as she walked to her truck, tossing the keys into the air and catching them again. She whistled to Boomer, helping him into the backseat. Jess was, as usual, near-silent in her gait, taking Jey once again by surprise when she appeared in the passenger’s seat. Jey couldn’t help shooting a smug, sidelong glance at her companion as she started the car. “Jessica, huh?”   
“Shut up,” the huntress snapped.

Jey obliged.

But she didn’t lose the grin.

\--

On the drive to Seed Ranch, Jess had come up with the idea of a century: turn murder into a game. Naturally, she didn’t call it murder. “Like turkey hunting,” she’d said. “Count the kills, whoever gets most wins.”

After negotiating the rules, so that Jey could have her captures or knockouts count- Jess had rolled her eyes incessantly at that- she agreed, and it was in that spirit that they took the manor of John Seed. It was as luxurious and overstated as the man himself, although the war effort had taken something out of it.

“Seven,” Jess boasted, sidling up to Jey as guns fired around them. Drawing and shooting another arrow, she grinned, watching another cultist fall to the ground. “Eight.”   
“I guess I shouldn’t ask how you’re so good at this,” Jey mumbled. She sighed, trying not to look too embarrassed. “I only got five.” After a moment of waiting for Jess’s expression to change out of pure amusement, Jey cleared her throat. “Anyway, are we clear?”

“I think so.” Jess’s head twitched slightly to the side, probably following something in her peripheral vision, or maybe still engulfed with pride. “Fuck- shit- bushes, now!”

Jey dived over the fence, landing awkwardly in the foliage below. Jess followed much more gracefully. “What? What happened?” Jey stage-whispered.

“John fucking Seed,” Jess growled. “Look.”   
Jey craned her head, but alas, the ledge was too high. She gave Jess a meaningful look, and with a long-suffering sigh, the huntress let Jey climb onto her shoulders.

Even a small wind would blow her and Jess over, but Jey managed to stay stable long enough to get a glimpse of Him. The Man. Smarmy Beard Man. John-the-Lawyer Seed.

Sliding off of Jess, she whispered, “How did this happen?”   
“He probably heard us attacking,” Jess replied in a hiss. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Jey glanced down at the ground for anything to distract him, picking up a variety of fist-sized stones and shoving them into her pockets. “I’m going to climb back up.”   
Jess grabbed her arm, trying to restrain her as a look of what was very nearly worry flashed across her features. “You out of your fucking mind?”   
Jey smiled. “I have a plan, sunshine.”

Jess’s grasp slowly slackened, and Jey climbed up the ledge, maneuvering her way into the nearest patch of bushes.

John passed by. She could practically smell the annoyance coming off of him. No entourage, other than a couple of normal-looking cultists who probably wouldn’t post much of a challenge.

Jey tossed a rock. “Hey. Hey, stinky. Get over here.”

One of the cultists came a little too close to her grass, and she knocked him out with a quick punch to the solar plexus. The other quickly followed.

And since John looked to be unarmed…

Jey stood up. “Hey, John.”

The man looked like he’d been electrocuted, cartoonishly shocked by her presence. As for her, Jey leaned casually against the wall of the house, lightly tossing stones at his feet (and occasionally center mass). “How’s it going?”

He narrowed his eyes. “So you’ve stolen my home.”

“Yeah,” she replied, nodding sagely.

John’s shoulders sagged, and he shook his head. None of the bravado that he’d had over the radio was showing- and none of the cruelty that he’d produced when trying to drown her. “Why do you continue to reject us? To refuse us? We are trying to help the people of this county. We may be their only hope in this world.” When Jey didn’t respond (outside of throwing another stone at him, narrowly missing his face), he added, “Why do you turn us away, Deputy?”   
She drew in a deep breath, then let most of it out with a laugh. “I’m sure you’re not used to hearing this, since you’re pretty attractive and all that, but you’re <i>really</i> not my type.”

John didn’t say anything for a long time, only flinching as more stones flew past him.

Jey was about to make another jab at him when he spoke again, the weight of his words punching her in the gut. “I could set you up with my sister. Faith. If that’s more your… you know.”   
Jey stared at him blankly.

John stared back.

She blinked three times.

He was apparently unaware of the words that had just come out of his mouth.

Finally, in a monotone, Jey responded. “Did you just try to seduce me into joining a cult?”

John shrugged.

“Jess!” Jey yelled in the general direction of the ledge they’d been hiding under. “Let’s get that plane. No one’s going to threaten us except for Lawyer-Beard over here.”

Jess appeared over the ledge, and without a further word, John was out of sight.

Boomer barked at them from the car.

Jey and Jess looked at each other.

“Fuck,” Jess murmured. “I forgot the fucking dog.”


	8. Chapter 8

The light from some fixture above her flooded her eyes, dim, warm, like one of the old Rembrandt paintings her parents had collected and put in the halls of their old house. She hadn’t exactly liked them as a child. She certainly didn’t now.

Honestly, she should have figured that John would try to kidnap her again. She also should have figured that he would succeed. For as well as their little conversation outside of the ranch had gone, John was still being remarkably antagonistic. Or maybe that was just in the job description for a Seed sibling: attractive, psychopathic, easily annoyed, and must hate the Deputy with all their heart and soul. 

Whatever John’s motivation was didn’t really matter. It wouldn’t change the fact that she was currently tied to a chair in a  _ very  _ sketchy bunker room, waiting for her captor to come in.

Maybe it was just her, but the lights in the room seemed to dim as John Seed finally appeared, wheeling someone- or something- in front of him. “Deputy,” he greeted.

There was that sting of poison she had heard in the first of his radio broadcasts. There it was, too, glinting behind his eyes.

“Nice to-” Jey’s throat closed over the rest of her sentence.

The person in the chair had come into the light, and God, oh, God, it was Hudson, her eyes wet, her mouth sealed shut with a neat section of duct tape.

It had been a game. To Jey, it had been a game. She had exchanged playful words with John Seed just a day or two ago, basking in the victory of taking his ranch.

Her stomach rolled. This wasn’t a game to Hudson. This was Hudson’s life. Her sanity.

How could she have forgotten that?

“Let her go,” Jey demanded, straining at the restraints on her wrists.

John smiled tightly at her. “You think that you can make demands, Deputy? You have no power here. At least not if you continue your irritating little rebellion.”   
“Rebellion’s all you’ll be seeing if you don’t let her go right fucking now,” Jey returned shortly. There was just a touch too much hysteria in her voice for him to take her seriously; she knew that, but the logic was not nearly enough to calm the fear crackling inside of her.

Her eyes connected with Hudson’s, and Jey didn’t think she’d ever seen her partner look as outright scared as she did now. She’d seen her angry, or annoyed, or even startled. But never this. Hudson was proud. This unbridled, all-encompassing fear, bleeding down her face in the shape of mascara, was just  _ wrong. _

“Join us,” said John levelly, the snap of fire lurking just beyond the edge of his voice, “and you will be spared. Perhaps, if the Father feels especially merciful… perhaps he will spare your friend, too.”

John turned away from her, instead picking up and examining a multitude of instruments that looked like they were made for torture. Finally, he settled on something that appeared to be a wicked cross between a hose handle and a power drill. A chill of anticipation crept into Jey’s stomach. “I am the Baptist,” he said in a dark voice. “I will make you confess. Every sin, no matter how petty…” He approached Jey’s chair with steps full of purpose, leaning over her with a frantic sort of anger, breaking the facade of calmness he had kept on his face. “You will scream it out in agony, and I will carve it into your skin. And when you have atoned, I will cut it from your skin.” He leaned in further, tearing open her shirt. “And you will be free.”

Jey’s chest clutched with red-hot rage as the stagnant air of the room greeted her chest. “You’re despicable.”

John pulled away, moving back toward Hudson with the awful device in his hands. “You should be careful what you say to us, Deputy.” He ran a thumb over Hudson’s cheek, and she cringed, her chest moving faster with panicked, shallow breaths. “If your friend here is making you too angry to listen to us, then maybe we’ll just kill her.”

“No!” The word was barely a scream, more of a yelp. 

John laughed. “Well, in that case, which one of you wants to go first? All you have to say is  _ yes. _ ”

Jey’s eyes connected with Hudson’s again. Without even thinking of the alternative, the words left her mouth. “Yes.”

John slammed the device onto the table, eyes glittering with contained, manic excitement. “You won’t regret this.”

But instead of approaching her with the instrument in hand, he took Hudson’s chair again, wheeling her out of the room.

“Damn it,” Jey whispered. There  was a staircase on the perimeter of the room. If she threw herself down it, she might be able to get out of the chair.

But that meant that she wouldn’t be here to protect Hudson.

So she waited for him to return- waited for him to take the instrument to her chest. For her partner, she would take this bullet. There had never been another option. It was either this or the unthinkable.

Terrible, aching minutes passed before John appeared again in the dim light of the room. He took up the instrument and, with a shaking, furious ecstasy, pressed its tip against Jey’s skin.

“Hey, John,” Jey said softly, interrupting his moment. “Look up.”   
He did, and once their heads were close enough to touch, Jey slammed hers forward with all the force that she could muster.

John’s face went red, then white. After that, he collapsed on the floor.

She bit at the cuffs on her wrists, tugging until she finally released one. The other came out easily. Jey rubbed at her wrists.

Now, all she had to do was get Hudson.

She picked John up with some difficulty, hoisting his arms over her shoulders, pulling him along with her. With his weight slowing her, she descended the staircase and dropped through a hatch, into what looked like a bunker. Cultists roamed around freely. When she came into their midst, their voices died away.

“Brother John,” one of them said, his voice a mixture of reverence and horror. “She’s got Brother John.”

Jey continued walking in silence, amassing a congregation of bewildered cultists behind her. When a pipe came into view, she leaped onto it, holding John’s dead weight in front of her. “Show me where the other deputy is, and I’ll give him back to you,” she ordered. “If you don’t, or you try to hurt either of us, you will never see him again. Got it?”   
One cultist looked to his fellows. Seeing their faces remain utterly lost, he sighed. “Follow me, Deputy.”

She did. He wound around dark corners and tight corridors. The bunker gave off a dark energy of impending doom- which, considering that it was a bunker, made sense. 

They finally reached a door with a tiny window. The cultist made no move to open it. 

Jey peered through the glass, and there she was: her partner, still shivering in that wheelchair. “Hudson,” she whispered. “Open the door,” she commanded the cultist. 

He only shook his head. “Only Brother John can open this one.”

There was no use fighting it; the cult had no reason to lie to her, not when she had their precious Baptist at her disposal. She’d have to come back later. With bombs and backup.

Her eyes met Hudson’s for the third time that day. Mirrored pain sprang up in Jey’s chest, poking a spear into her heart, and overcome with it, the weight of John’s body slipped out of her arms.

“He’s safe!” her cultist screamed to the others. “Get the Deputy! Kill her!”

Gunfire echoed in the halls. Jey shot away and upward, toward the light of the outside that she could practically taste. 

With a leap and a wild sprint, daylight flooded her eyes, fresh air blessed her straining lungs, and Jey was once again free.

She pulled out her radio. With a smile, her only word into it was “Jess”.


	9. Chapter 9

Jess’s demeanor had changed, ever so slightly, since the second kidnapping. Sure, she was still rough, cool, concerned mostly with her own safety- but something more was there. Something that Jey would almost call worry. Every time Jey had lost her footing on the side of a mountain, or taken a bit too much force from a punch, or even just let out a yelp of surprise, Jess was there faster than Jey could register.

Jey had tried to point it out to her, but Jess had, as per usual, dismissed the notion with a mumble of dissent. “Just don’t want to have to go lookin’ for you again,” she’d insisted again and again. But Jey continued to hound her with knowing grins, not-so-subtle winks- she’d even faked slipping a few times just to see all the color in the huntress’s face drain.

She was used to this sort of rapport. Jey would freely admit that she had a strange track record of getting close to scarred, brusque blondes with penchants for sniping. Jess’s initial coldness was nothing new to her. She knew she’d get past it eventually; it was just a matter of  _ when. _

So she had delayed the assault on John, just a little bit. Of course, the Resistance was still wreaking havoc, and to top their efforts off, Jey had blown quite a few silos into the air along the way. But, she had rationalized to Jess, the two of them needed a home base. Somewhere the cult couldn’t find them. Somewhere they could plan their attack. 

They’d been scouring the residential areas of Holland Valley for the better part of a day when they had found somewhere suitable: a small, but functional, little bunker, its owner obviously gone. The evening was spent cleaning the walls of blood and transporting some other supplies out of a nearby home, furnishing the bunker. After the first few trips out, Boomer had gotten tired of the lugging and laid down on one of the lower bunks, a scene that Jey was now taking too many pictures of.

“Mary May’s nice enough to give you a camera and you waste it on the fuckin’ dog?” Jess grumbled from an enormous nest of blankets.

Jey obliged her with a smile, putting the camera into her bag. “It’s a digital camera, Jess. I can’t  _ waste  _ it.” When the huntress didn’t respond, she flopped onto the bed next to Boomer, mindlessly petting his ears. “And speaking of Mary May…”   
Jess winced, her cheeks going red. “Yeah?”   
Jey gave her The Look. The special Look that, at least in the city, all her fellow lesbians shared. “Jess… I think you know what I’m getting at here.”   
“No fuckin’ idea,” Jess deadpanned. She withdrew deeper into her blanket pile.

Jey leaned forward, eyes glittering with a mischievous grin. “You  _ like  _ her.” The absurdity of the situation wasn’t enough to put a damper on her enthusiasm: here they were, a huntress and a deputy, both fully grown women who had killed at least two people each within the last 24 hours, talking about crushes.

“I-” Jess coughed, looking at the ground. “No I don’t,” she offered in a timid undertone.

Jey just watched and waited until the huntress mumbled a near-inaudible “...yes I do.”

At that, she smiled widely. “You told her yet?”   
Jess looked enormously uncomfortable, but still, she shook her head. “Don’t think it would get me anywhere.”

“Aww, don’t say that!” Jey scratched Boomer’s neck vigorously, and he rolled over, begging for a belly rub. Jey happily obliged. “Who’s to say she doesn’t like you back?”   
Jess scoffed. “I don’t know, common sense? Mare’s not gonna go for someone like me.” Her expression was, as always, more than a little irritated, but it also held tints of resignation and wistfulness.

Jey resisted the overpowering urge to get up and pat Jess on the head. It most certainly would not be a welcome gesture. Instead, she sighed. “I think you should give it a shot.”

Jess mumbled something inaudible in return, then cleared her throat and came back with something entirely unexpected. “Why do you keep doing all this… stuff for me?”   
“What do you mean?” Jey asked, letting Boomer crawl into her lap and attempt to curl up.

Jess let out a short breath, gaze flickering between Jey and the floor. “I mean, why do you care about me?”   
“‘Cause you’re my friend,” Jey replied promptly. “That’s what friends do.”   
Jess shifted in the pile of blankets. “Haven’t had anyone care about me since my Granny died.”

Jey was about to ask about where the rest of her family had gone when her radio put out a loud burst of static, refining into a snippet of John’s voice. Groaning, she picked it up. “What the hell do you want, Seed? I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

“The time has come, Deputy.” His voice filled the bunker. Jess’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second. “I have given you your chances. I have kept you alive.”   
“I’m pretty sure  _ I  _ was the one keeping me alive,” Jey said.

Jess grunted, amused. Jey looked back at her with an apologetic smile.

“Come to Fall’s End,” John said in what he probably thought was an authoritative tone. “We’ll see how much longer your beginner’s luck lasts.”

Jey sighed and put the radio back on her belt, then pulled out her map, marking the spot where the bunker was. “Should we go?”   
“Don’t think we have a choice.” Jess extracted herself from the blankets and stretched like a cat.

Jey whistled for Boomer and picked him up with some difficulty, climbing the ladder as carefully as she could. He scrambled out into the grass as soon as he could. “Mangler,” she commanded. Boomer obediently sat down next to the truck. Jey held open the door, letting him in, before getting into the driver’s seat. Within seconds, Jess was in the passenger’s. “Let’s kick the shit out of him,” she said with a little bit too much excitement in her voice.

“Yeah,” Jey agreed. She revved the engine. “Let’s take back Holland Valley.”


	10. Chapter 10

When the air shrieked past her ears again, just as it had done back in the helicopter that whole eternity ago, Jey’s blood was not pounding with excitement. It was rage. Nick Rye, the poor man, would wear that scar for the rest of his life- the scar that screamed out a sin he had never committed. Now, the rage in her chest was all-encompassing. John Seed. John Seed would die for his sins just as all those innocent civilians had.

Although, she had to admit, interspersed with the anger were flashes of pure adrenaline. If John didn’t kill her, then piloting this plane might, even as she desperately tried to recall what her old partner had told her over and over about flying. Something about levers and… what was it that Nick had talked her through when she was flying Carmina?

Jey missed something- she couldn’t tell what- and the plane dropped a full hundred feet, sending her stomach into her throat. “Fuck, shit!”   
From behind her, in the gunning seat or whatever the hell it was called, the irritated voice of Jess barely made it over the loud buffet of the wind. “What the fuck was that?!”   
“I’m sorry, I’m-” Jey cut herself off as the black shape of Affirmation once again appeared against the dimming twilight of the sky. “Bandit left!”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Maybe some of Aleksandrov’s pilot slang had slipped into her vocabulary after all. “John’s on our left! I’m banking! Try to catch him!”   
Their plane passed his, and the guns went wildly into action, rattling off shot after shot after shot into his engines. “Jess!” Jey yelled. “Shoot out the-”

An arrow whizzed past her window. “For fuck’s sake, you can’t do that! It’s a plane!”   
“Watch me!” Three more arrows followed the first, headed dead straight toward the plane. Two of them glanced off of its dark wing, flying into open space- Jey prayed that they wouldn’t hit anyone on their way down- and the third lodged miraculously into the engine. Immediately, a plume of smoke erupted out of it. John’s voice burst in static shocks through the radio. Jey couldn’t catch much of it, other than “Mayday!  _ Mayday!” _ _   
_ “Drop her!” Jess yelled.

Fighting to remember the right controls, Jey eased the plane down into a landing. The ground flew up at her far too fast. The plane slammed into an undignified stop, whiplash practically sending her out of the door.

Jey unbuckled her seat belt and slid out of the plane, groaning with relief. Jess hopped out of her own seat and yanked Jey back to her feet. “Not done yet, Dep. Let’s find that fucker.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jey slung her shotgun over her shoulder again, heart still slamming mercilessly against the wall of her chest. “Jesus… don’t ever make me fly a plane again, okay?”   
Jess chuckled. “After that stunt? I’d have to be fuckin’ suicidal.”

The woods of Holland Valley weren’t exactly tame, but it was actually a pleasant walk through them- or, maybe, it  _ would  _ have been pleasant under different circumstances. As it was, Jey and Jess both were focused entirely on following a trail of fresh blood, stark against the foliage of the forest floor. 

And then, they were following the soft, telltale crunches of leaves under heavy shoes, and the softer mumblings of John Seed’s low voice. “I know you’re here!” he shouted.

Before Jess could react, Jey stepped into his clearing. “Yeah, I’m here.”

His eyes flashed as he pointed the gun at her chest.  _ “Deputy.”  _ But despite the heavy- almost contrived- hatred in his voice, his finger was nowhere near the trigger.

Jey tilted her head, and a single arrow pierced the center of his exposed chest. Another followed just as quickly, knocking the gun from his hands. He barely had time to blink before he fell to the ground.

Jey drew her gun, sighing softly, and played with it for a moment, waiting for him to say something. He would. He was too dramatic to go out without a monologue of some kind.

But, seeming to sense her intent, he didn’t go into any such thing. Instead, when he spoke, it sounded quiet and defeated, like a little child who had gotten in trouble. “I am the Baptist,” he said softly. “But I am also a sinner. You know that I am a sinner, Deputy, just as you are.”

“Give me a reason not to shoot you right now,” Jey challenged.

John laughed dryly. “I don’t have one.”

Jey hesitated. Really? No value on his own life? No attempt to save himself?

What was in those eyes, after all? Was it really just sadism?

She cast back in her memory, and another pair of dark blue eyes, haunted just like his were, glittered in the back of her conscious.

Darkness didn’t come from hate; it came from trauma.

Shouldn’t she know this by now?   
Jey put away her gun and sat down on the ground, level with him. “What happened to you, John?”

He made eye contact, pained blue meeting curious brown. “Do you really want to know?”   
She nodded wordlessly, and after a pregnant silence, he started again, his voice constricting so subtly that Jey almost couldn’t hear the difference. “I was so young when Jacob and Joseph took me away from our parents. Jacob… must have thought it would be better for us anywhere else. I don’t even remember them, other than… other than…”

“It’s okay,” Jey said gently, her heart’s resolve to hate him already weakening. “You don’t have to tell me everything.”   
He exhaled in what she thought was thanks. “Well, the Duncans weren’t a kind family. They hurt me over and over again. I was a sinner. I was unholy. Unworthy. Unlovable and unwanted. And when I embraced  _ yes,  _ it was… a reprieve from that. All I had to do was hate myself as much as they did, and the pain stopped being pain. It started being absolution.”

Jey’s chest tightened.

“Absolution. I became obsessed with it. Confession. Cleanliness. Purity of heart. But I knew I’d never get there. So why try? Instead of pursuing virtue, I fell into vice.” His gaze fell mechanically upon his left hand. “Avaritia… gula… invidia… libidine.  _ Especially  _ libidine. I was… addicted. And no matter what I did, I remained unwanted, alone… worthless.”

To her dismay, Jey felt a prick of heat at the back of her eyes. Torture. A child, and to be tortured like that.

“Joseph came along, and I wanted to please him. He was my original salvation, and I knew he would be it again. I just knew. For once, somebody wanted me. Somebody cared about me. So I joined, and I clung to him like I was still a child.” He let out a brief, rough, humorless laugh. “I don’t know why I’m saying this like it’s in the past.”

His eyes rose again to hers, and with a simple conviction, he spoke again. “I am a sinner, Deputy. And I cannot be cleansed.” He bowed his head. “Cleanse me.”   
The heat came to the forefront of Jey’s eyes, and then dripped down her cheeks.

“You’re not a sinner, John,” she said, her voice tighter from hearing of his trauma than his had been describing it. “You’re a human. Humans make mistakes.” She paused. “And I don’t kill them.”   
Then, as though her body had a will of its own, she stood up, lifting him by the shoulders- almost as she had in the bunker- and putting him back on his feet. She didn’t let go immediately. Instead, she pulled him closer, arms wrapping securely around his chest. “You say you can’t be cleansed, and you can’t, because I don’t think anyone can be really free of the sins in their past. But you can be redeemed. Don’t forget, but forgive. Like elephants.”

John’s body was stock-still, frozen in shock. His arms made the suggestion of a movement to reciprocate the hug, but they fell back before they could complete it.

Jey released him, taking his hand. “We’re going back to Fall’s End now, and you’re coming with us.” She gave him a reassuring squeeze. “The cult was never the answer for you, John. Maybe this is.”

Jess reappeared from the bushes, looking bemused and somewhat irritated. “Is he-?”

Jey looked at him. “Are you?”

John sighed. “Do I have a choice?”   
Jey shook her head.

John removed his hand from hers, so Jey locked his wrist in a vice-like grip instead. He mumbled something under his breath which both women took to be an affirmation, and with the mood of the evening more bizarre and heartfelt than anything Jey had known before, they set out for the town.

\--

Thankfully, the electronic cuff that had, for some reason, just been lying around the town, fit around John’s ankle nicely. Mary May hadn’t been too pleased to have him confined in the upper level of the Spread Eagle, but with Jess’s assurance that no harm would come to her ( _ “right, Deputy?” _ ) she had eventually settled down. As for John, he had been staying silent in the corner when Jey had left the bar, probably vastly humiliated by the broadcast he had been forced to make. But this was the only way forward. John had called off the dogs; some defecting to the Resistance, their worldviews broken by the mercy of their hated Deputy, some fleeing to the other regions, and some remaining to die.

Once again, a sleepless night. Jey watched the sun rise as she advanced toward it. Right now, only one thing mattered.

The rescue mission they’d dispatched to John’s Gate must have gone a different way, because when Jey saw the lone figure illuminated by the crescent of the sun, there was no sign of anyone else near her. She was standing limp, her face gaunt, her demeanor hardened by God knew how long in that bunker.

Jey came close enough to see her. “Hudson,” she breathed out.

She rushed forward, closing the distance between them in an instant, and hugged her as tightly as she could without fear of breaking something.

The morning lit the sky, and it was greeted by the sobbing- overjoyed or regretful or relieved, no one could ever know- of two lost Deputies, who had finally found their way back to each other.

And Jey, in her partner’s arms, did not think she had ever been happier.


	11. Chapter 11

Hudson slapped the side of the truck, shoulders more relaxed now than they’d been for the entire last week. “Nice piece.” She paused a moment, contemplating the landscape, before turning her eyes back to Jey, just a little bit too much worry in them. “You’re sure about this?”   
Jey smiled sadly and opened the door. “Holland Valley’s free, but the rest of the county isn’t. Whitehorse needs me.” She tilted her head at Jess, who remained outside the Spread Eagle talking with Mary May. “‘Sides, I won’t be alone.”

Hudson turned to look at the huntress and the barkeep, stifling a low laugh as she took in the pair. “I don’t know about that. She seems pretty taken with what she’s doing right now.”   
“You mean what she  _ wishes  _ she was doing,” Jey said fondly, shaking her head. “Jess! You coming?”

Jess tore herself away from Mary May, who sent her off with a kiss on the cheek that, no doubt, would plague her dreams for the next month- and it showed, her face becoming a shade of red deeper than Jey had ever seen on a living soul before. She had to suppress the urge to laugh out loud.

Pastor Jerome jogged up to the truck. “Good luck out there, Deputy. We’ll handle things here.”   
Looking at the silhouette of John through the window of the Spread Eagle, Jey lowered her voice, pulling him aside. “Reverend, I know that the Bible teaches mercy, but…”

He followed her line of sight and nodded when he saw the man. “If this is your decision, then I’ll respect it. All of us will.”

When she remained grave, he patted her shoulder in assurance. “You made the right choice. Mercy is always the most virtuous option. Remember, ‘therefore be merciful…’”

Jey chimed in, finally smiling. “‘Just as your Father also is merciful.’” She breathed out. “Thank you, Reverend.”

He returned the smile. “God protect you.”

“And you as well.” She turned back to Jess, who had once again approached silently. “You ready to go?”   
Jess sighed deeply, sending one last, longing look (she probably thought it was subtle) in the direction of the bar. “Fine.”

Jey fingered her scarf, tying it a little bit more snugly around her neck, before jumping into the driver’s seat. She whistled for Boomer, who came bounding out of the Spread Eagle, only stopping to give Mary May’s hand a lick, and leaped gracefully into the bed of the truck. Jey turned to wave goodbye to Fall’s End.

A certain warmth unfurled in her chest when she saw the collection of people who had come to see her off. Pastor Jerome, standing strong and ready to heal Holland Valley. Mary May, warm and welcoming and more than capable of handling John. A few ragtag Resistance members. Even Nick Rye and Kim- more heavily pregnant by the day- had turned up for the celebration.

Jey had certainly come a long way since the helicopter crash.

“We going or what?” Jess said impatiently, fingers tapping out an anticipatory rhythm on the dashboard.

Jey took one last look at the people who had come to be her most important allies. She nodded, rolled her window up, and started the car. “We’re going.”

\--

The drive to the Henbane River wasn’t long- Hope County was too small for  _ any  _ road trip to be long, really- but along the way, as they set off out of Fall’s End to the Hope County Jail, rain began to pelt down on the roads like some kind of omen. Jess didn’t make any comment on it, but Jey found some unhappy feeling in the sudden, heavy grayness of the sky. Maybe this would remind her to be humble. After all the stunts she’d pulled in the Valley, she wouldn’t be surprised if God himself had sent this along as a way of saying ‘hey, kid, take it back a few notches.’

But who was she kidding? Humility wasn’t her thing. And frankly, she was still  _ very  _ pleased with herself about her victory over the cult. Well, a third of the cult. Approximately.

The momentum from that victory was enough to drive her to avoid getting into any skirmishes in the drive from the . Sure, Jess fired off a few arrows into tires here and there, but nothing would stop Jey from getting to the jail.

She looked up, and the truck screeched to a stop.

Nothing would stop her… except maybe  _ that. _

Above the trees, slowly lowering into a graceful landing, was a pink helicopter, and as it came closer and closer to the ground, the head of a middle-aged woman popped out of the window. “Goodness me, are you the Deputy?” She caught sight of Jess, who was cowering into her seat with the most pure fear Jey had ever seen on her. “Well, I’ll be damned, if it isn’t Jessica Black! How’re you doing, sugar?”

Jess failed to respond, pulling her hood down to cover her face, so Jey waved to the woman. “Who are you?”

“Adelaide Drubman, the one and only! You can call me Addie, though.” She winked at Jey, then swore as a shot from somewhere rattled her helicopter. “Goddamn Peggies won’t let me catch a break! Give me a hand, sweet cheeks?”

Jey reluctantly opened her door and stepped out, slipping a whispered coax to Jess as she did so. Looking like she was in the eleventh circle of hell, Jess followed.

Two helicopters broke through the haze of gray clouds, painted the noticeable white of the cult with that signature cross scrawled on their noses. From her helicopter, Adelaide released a volley of shots that tangled in one of the enemy helicopter’s motors, and from her position on the ground, Jey finished the job. Jess leaped on top of the truck and fired off an arrow into the of the remaining engine, just as she had done to take out John, and within seconds it crashed into the ground with a burst of fire and shards of shrapnel flying past Jey’s head.

Addie landed the helicopter, getting out of it with a stretch. “Thank God you showed up! I’d have been in more trouble than a hooker in church if you two hadn’t come along.” She lunged for Jess, pulling her into a bone-crushing hug. Jey’s face scrunched in pain just watching it. “Jess, honey! I’m so glad you’re okay, sugar muffin!”

Jess managed to pull herself out of the embrace, the disgust on her face hilariously similar to a disgruntled cat, and muttered a “hello”. 

Jey cleared her throat and stepped forward as Jess not-so-subtly hid behind her. “Nice to meet you, Addie.”

Adelaide grinned, yanking her in for a hug as well, and dear God, the look on Jess’s face had  _ not  _ been overblown. Jey’s ribs were practically turning to dust. “Nice to meet you too, pumpkin! When they said there was a Deputy tearing shit up, I had no idea she’d be so damn cute!”

When the older woman finally let her go, Jey had to cough a couple of times to erase the feeling of being crushed from her torso. “Uh…”

“But I don’t have the time for small talk. Say, sweetie, would you mind helping me out on another little errand?”   
“Don’t say yes,” Jess mumbled into Jey’s ear.

“Sure,” Jey replied. “How can I help?”

“Fuck you,” Jess whispered.

Adelaide grinned. “Just follow me to my marina. My chunky hunky man-meat has all the information you’ll need.”

Jey got back into the truck, and Adelaide’s chopper began to fly away, slowly enough that she could keep up.

“Why the fuck did you say yes? I told you not to say yes. Fuck’s sake, she’s probably going to have you give her a back massage or some shit like that,” Jess grumbled.

Jey laughed and looked to the road, pushing away the urges to shake herself like a dog and get dry again. “I can’t  _ not  _ help people, Jess. I know sometimes we don’t want to, but it’s doesn’t work like that. I can’t turn away.”

“Real hero,” Jess said, turning to the window. She sounded annoyed- as usual- but also strangely regretful.

Jey turned her eyes to her companion for a moment. “You okay, Jess?”   
Jess sighed. “I’ll… I’ll tell you about it later. We got a job to do.”

Well, that was a lot more open and emotionally stable than Jey was used to hearing her, and really, it wasn’t an unwelcome surprise. But other than that comment, Jess stayed silent for the rest of the ride.

The helicopter finally slowed and began to lower over what looked like a marina. “We’re here,” Jey said to Jess, not entirely sure if she was asleep.

Jess stretched and got out of the car once again. The rain had softened to a light mist, but it was still uncomfortably cold when Jey got out of the car, and the nearby lake didn’t help.

The helicopter landed a few hundred feet away, and Addie sprinted out of it. Remarkably nimble woman for her age. “Marina was swarming with Peggies just a couple of hours ago. I was chasing the last of those dick-wranglin’ socialists off when I ran into you two,” she said, not at all out of breath, when she caught up to them. “Anyway, Xander should be- oh, there he is.”   
A young, exceptionally muscular man ran out of the building. “Adelaide! My angel, my princess! I’m wasting away for want of- uh- because I want your love so bad!”   
Something in his voice screamed ‘didn’t finish high school,’ but Jey wasn’t about to comment on it.

“Aww, Xander, have you been reading?” Addie said in a tone halfway between pride and amusement.

“Yeah!” He sounded much too pleased with himself. When he turned around, catching sight of Jess and Jey, his eyes widened comically. “Who are these guys?”   
Jey smiled at him. He seemed nice, if a little bit slow. She wasn’t one to judge, really; she could be really, really stupid sometimes too. “Junior Deputy Jane-Marie Clark. Most people call me Jey. And this here’s Jess Black, but I’m sure you already know her.”   
“Nice to meet you,” Xander said, patting Jey on the shoulder. “Hi, Jess.” Unlike everyone else they had met, he didn’t pull Jess into a hug or even touch her at all. Instead, he just nodded respectfully. Jess’s shoulders immediately relaxed, and she gave Jey a distinct ‘I-like-this-guy’ look. Or maybe she was just slightly less irritated than normal. It could be either.

“They’re going to help us with that little project of yours, honey,” Adelaide said. “Let them know about it while I fire up Tulip, okay?”   
“Of course!” His face brightened immediately. “So there are these Bliss barrels, and they’re super explosive, right? And they’re, like, really sketchy, and people go crazy when they’re around it for too long, so I was thinking-”   
“Blow them up,” Jey said, grinning.

“Exactly!” He pointed to the helicopter. “Adelaide’s going to fly you over to this depository, and then you can take care of whoever’s there and blow up all that Bliss.”

Adelaide finished checking over the helicopter, and wiping off a few spots of dust, she gestured for Jey and Jess to join her. “Come on, kids, we have blowin’ to do!”

Jess deposited herself in the back seat, as far away from Addie as she could get, while Jey accepted her fate in the passenger seat.

This was going to be one hell of an interesting ride.

\--

Green mist enveloped her vision as she fired explosive after explosive into the never-ending sea of barrels. Xander was going on in her ear about the differences between lettuce green and kale green, while Adelaide was only responding with hums and mumbles, and Jess had gone radio silent, most likely catching up with the stragglers that she and Jey hadn’t managed to clear out beforehand. 

The chaos was so loud, and so inescapable, that it should have surprised Jey more when it cut off completely. No Xander, no Addie, no Jess. But it didn’t.

Instead, she felt a sense of surreal joy. Of peace. Of something inexplicably beautiful and extraordinarily strange.

The Bliss, or what she could only assume to be Bliss, stopped being an inconsistency and started being the truth of the world.

A glimpse of golden hair flashed in the periphery of the pale green plane that had become everything.

_ “Welcome to the Bliss…” _


	12. Chapter 12

A ghostlike, but incredibly real, hand drifted across Jey’s upper arm. Her eyes followed it with complete fascination. Slender, fair, tinted with green and tiny, surreal irregularities that let her know this wasn’t entirely real. “I know you’ve heard stories about me…”

Jey found herself staring, entranced, at a woman. The woman from the family photo all that time ago.

Faith Seed.

But she didn’t look like a villain. She didn’t even look much like a person. She looked like some sort of angel, or- or fairy, or…

Faith stood, one leg behind the other, in the green haze of the Bliss, and Jey just… stared.

And then, she began to move, her bare feet almost floating off the ground. “That I’m a liar. A  _ manipulator. _ ” Her hands skated over Jey’s arm with a strange familiarity. “That I poison people’s minds.”

Jey forced out a few words, trying not to make eye contact. “I haven’t heard any of that.”

Faith paused, and then giggled, touching Jey’s cheek softly. “Good. Because none of it is true.” She tilted her head, a serene smile gracing her features. “You’re the Deputy, aren’t you? You’re the one who captured John.”

Jey nodded wordlessly. She could barely process everything that was happening: Faith’s eyes, Faith’s golden hair, Faith’s seraphic voice. Jesus Christ, this wasn’t good.

“Let me tell you a story,” Faith began, pulling both of them down to sit on the ground that may not have even been there. “A story about a young woman who had been ostracized from her community… abused by her family… bullied by her friends. She took to a needle to help.” Her voice broke in a manner just a little bit too animated to be believed. “The young woman wanted to die. And then… she met the Father.” A bright smile lit up her face.

“I’m going to stop you right there,” Jey said simply, looking away to try and break the spell the woman had put her under. “I know where this is going.”   
Faith didn’t sound disappointed. It was more gentle amusement. “Really?”   
Jey smiled weakly. “I’m not going to join the cult.”

“We aren’t a cult,” Faith reprimanded her with an understanding smile. “We’re a family. A family that protects one another. By any means necessary.”

Jey laughed. “That’s, uh, Machiavellian of you.” She hadn’t used that word since a book report in tenth grade, but the circumstance demanded it. “Look, I… I want to see the best in you, I really do, but you people kill civilians.”

“Because they’re in our way,” Faith reasoned. “Those who won’t accept salvation can’t be saved.”

Jey looked back to her, and boy, was that a mistake, because once again she was caught up in the minute details of everything; the gleam of a dozen shades of blue in her eyes, the soft gradients between tones in her skin, the delicate taper of her eyelashes, the slope of her shoulders. She fell silent for a long time.

Apparently too long, because Faith changed the subject. “You spared my brother. Why?”

“He…” Jey ran through her line of reasoning for that decision again. It felt much too intimate to share with Faith. “I don’t kill people.” She could have added ‘unlike someone I know’, but that had been pretty well proven already.    
Some retort about Jey having killed dozens of cultists was very clearly on the tip of Faith’s tongue, but instead of saying it, Faith just smiled. “The quality of mercy. Maybe you can join our family after all.”

Jey raised her eyebrows. “Why don’t you join mine instead?”   
Faith’s face glowed with soft amusement, and she took Jey’s wrists in her hands, leaning closer. “You're adorable.”

With that, every coherent thought in Jey’s mind ground to an undignified halt. “Uh…”

Faith stood up, guiding Jey to her feet, and gestured at the landscape around them. In the distance, a man who looked a lot like Joseph Seed raised his arms in prayer. “Look around us,” she said softly, leaning down to pick a flower. “Isn’t this beautiful? Don’t you want to stay here forever?”   
“I…” 

Jey’s eyes began to fill with green, smoky mist, and as Faith saw her fading away, she reached forward with a desperate look. “Don’t leave me now,” she said, a note of worry in her voice. “Come on, we’re so close.”

As the plane of green shimmered and dripped out of existence, Jey falling with it, she heard Faith whisper something about  _ Joseph  _ in a tone that could only be described as fear.

\--

“Jey? Jey!” A hard hand slapped into her face like a car. “Wake the fuck up, you fuckin’ fuck!”

Jey began to come to, but the voice continued. “If you die on me, I fucking swear-”

“Easy,” said another, slightly more tempered voice- a familiar one. “She’s alive.”

Wanting to prove the point, but unable to form a coherent word, Jey moaned.

“Jesus Christ!” the rough voice yelped.   
She blinked her eyes open to see two blurry faces- one hooded, scarred, and visibly worried, and the other concerned but gentle. “...Jess? Sheriff?”

Sheriff Whitehorse patted her upper arm. “Hey there, kid. Good to have you back.”

Jess glared at her. “You ever fucking scare me like that again and I’ll shoot you in the ass again.”

Jey laughed groggily. “Thanks.”

In the corner of the room, a glowing apparition sparked into life. Those eyes… that hair…

Since when had Faith been able to become a magic ghost?

Jey put a hand over her eyes. “Fuck’s sake.”

The Sheriff laughed wholeheartedly, ruffling her hair. “Haven’t heard you use language like that before, Rookie.”

Jey peeked over her hand. The apparition was gone. “I guess Jess is rubbing off on me.”

“We were real worried about you,” Whitehorse said, sitting down next to the bed she’d been dumped in. “You can’t just come cold-turkey out of the Bliss like that. Does all sorts of messed-up things to your body, not to mention your mind. You feeling okay?”   
Jey sat up. Other than a throbbing headache that was already beginning to recede, she didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. “Yeah. I’m okay.” Looking around, at the stone walls and the concrete floors, she chanced a guess. “...Are we in the jail?”

“Yeah,” Jess said quietly. “You passed out on that mission with Adelaide and some Peggie dragged you off to God knows where. Found you in a field of Bliss a few hours ago.”

“Sheriff, I-” Jey sighed. “You wouldn’t happen to have some work for me, would you?”   
Whitehorse’s face gained a small glint of hope. “Talk to Virgil. He could use you. We need your help, Rook.”

Jess helped Jey into a stand, and she brushed off her jeans. “Seems like everyone does nowadays.” She glanced at Jess. “Ready to go?”   
“Always.”

Boomer’s nose bumped into her hand, and she patted him in consolation. But he still sniffed and sniffed at her, ears going back, until he finally let out a low growl.

“I know, buddy,” she told him under her breath. “I’ve been rolling in some really weird places.”


	13. Chapter 13

The three of them- the huntress, the dog, and the Deputy- piled into the Mangler once again, but with the green haze of the Bliss still in the periphery of her mind and her vision, Jey was silent for most of the ride. She should have been focusing on the outside world. Or talking to Jess. Anything that would keep her head out of the clouds. But she just… couldn’t. Every time she blinked, or looked around a little too fast, she could see another flash of that golden hair, beckoning her back to the realm of Faith Seed.

She was only vaguely aware of the unusual, uncomfortable mood inside the truck. It wasn’t normal, she knew that much, for her to be silent, and for Jess to be the one making the offhanded comments. “Nice day,” the huntress said, gaze shifting between the window and Jey.

Jey didn’t respond.

“Okay, that’s fuckin’ enough,” Jess burst out. “What’s wrong with you? What  _ happened _ ?”

Jey jolted back to attention. “What?”

“You’re being… creepy!” Jess growled, staring back at the passing landscape. “Where the hell are we even going? You haven’t talked to me at all!”   
“I-” Jey sighed, focusing on the road again. “It’s nothing.”

“Like fuck it’s  _ nothing, _ ” Jess snapped.

“Yeah? Maybe I don’t feel comfortable talking to you. God knows you never talk to  _ me, _ ” Jey retorted, an unfamiliar irritation brewing in her. “Anyway, it’s none of your business.”

“Fine!” Jess turned back to the window, arms crossed and glare stony.

“Fine.” Jey tapped her thumbs on the steering wheel.

A wall of hard silence sat between them. Jey felt her thoughts being tugged back to Faith, and finally, she let out a long sigh. The anger in her chest dissipated into a confusing mess of other, muted feelings. “I’m sorry, Jess. I didn’t mean it. I’m just…” She searched for the word. Some phrase, some vocabulary, that would let her describe the sort of  _ something  _ that she’d been through. “I don’t know,” she finished lamely.

“...Nah. You’ve got a point.” Jess’s voice was surprisingly… soft. Timid, almost. She didn’t move her gaze from the window.

“I do?”

“About me not talking to you.” Jess fidgeted with the hem of her hoodie, looking more uncomfortable than Jey had ever seen her. “I told you that I’d tell you about our first mission, and… and I never did.” She laughed roughly. “So… story for a story? I tell you this, you tell me what’s wrong?”   
Jey smiled. “Deal.”

“I, uh…” Jess coughed. “I’ll never forget when I first met him. The Cook.” Her words were filled with a rare, vehement breed of hatred that drove a needle into Jey’s heart. “Fact that he’s dead doesn’t make me any less angry at that bastard. He… I won’t give you all the details. Don’t wanna scar you forever.” She reached up to her cheek, tracing one of her many scars. “No pun intended. Anyway, long and short of it is, he kidnapped me and my parents, tortured us, starved us. I thought I was going to die. It was only ‘cause of my Granny that I escaped. My parents weren’t that lucky.” She stilled for a moment, her eyes becoming glassy. “Watched ‘em die right in front of me. Not quick, either. Fucker made it last.” She exhaled. “Haven’t felt much of anything since.”

On impulse, Jey pulled the car to the side of the road in a quick movement. 

“What the fuck was that for?” Jess snapped.

The huntress found herself cut off when Jey pulled her into a tight, fierce hug, willing back her tears. It made sense. Finally, it made sense, and Jey hated why.

“I should never have- I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry, Jess.”

“Fuckin’ hell, don’t go crying on me,” Jess grumbled. When Jey refused to move, Jess awkwardly returned the embrace, patting her on the shoulder. “Come on, please don’t cry.”

“I just… you can’t just tell me something like that and-” Jey’s shoulders marginally shook as she broke, letting the built-up tears release. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

“It’s okay. I’m used to it.” Jess tolerated the hug for another moment before gently moving to extricate herself. Jey let her go with the utmost reluctance. “Besides, you promised me a story too.”

Jey nodded, wiping her eyes. “I did.” She steeled herself, breathing as steadily as she could, taking as much time as she could before Jess would get impatient. “When I got knocked out, I don’t know where I went. The Bliss, it… made me have some kind of hallucination. Everything was green, and nothing was in focus, except… except Faith. She barely looked  _ human,  _ Jess.”

“What? Like… like a monster?”   
“Like an angel,” Jey said softly, closing her eyes and seeing the golden hair, the blue-green eyes, the soft glow of her skin again. “She was  _ beautiful _ , Jess. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

“Are you fuckin’ serious?” Jess barked out a laugh. “ _ That’s  _ what’s doing this to you? You got a crush on a fucking Seed?”

“Something like that.” Jey’s cheeks heated up. “Don’t tell, okay?”   
“We’re not kids,” Jess said. 

Jey glared at her.

“Yeah, yeah. Your secret’s safe with me.”

Jey started the car again. “Thanks, Jess. Let’s go, yeah?”

“Where  _ are  _ we going?” Jess asked, returning to her position staring out the window.

“Water supply,” Jey answered. “It’s contaminated with Bliss. We’re destroying the pumps.”

Jess grinned. “Sounds like fun.”

In a friendlier quiet, Jey continued to drive, and the mist on the hills in the distance was only slightly more green than usual.

\--

Another barrel exploded behind Jey, and from her vantage point, Jess laughed. “Nice one, Dep!”

A cultist fell with an arrow sticking out of his head. “Not bad yourself,” Jey returned, aiming a shotgun blast at another Peggie. “Clear?”   
Jess gave the surroundings a cursory glance. “Clear.”

She slung her gun back over her shoulder.

A huge opening, full of water and ready to be explored, loomed in the middle of the compound. “I guess I need to go in there, don’t I?”

“Maybe I should go,” Jess cut in. “I mean, there’s a lot of Bliss around here. You sure you want to risk seeing Faith again?”   
Jey shook her head, smiling. “It’s okay. I can do it, I promise. No hallucinations necessary.”

She dived into the water without a second thought, the experience of summers swimming in the lake at her family’s estate driving her forward effortlessly. The pumps were easy to find and just as easy to destroy.

As the last one exploded in a tide of mist, Jey’s vision began to swim once again, turning green and red and white, stars floating in front of her eyes.

And then it all went black.

\--

“I didn’t think I would see you again so soon.” Her voice was so soft, so tender, so… intimate. “I’m glad you came.”

“Faith,” Jey murmured, letting her focus come to rest on the woman. She looked for other words, but nothing came to mind, and once again she was speechless.

“Maybe it’s too much to hope that you might have come around by now,” Faith said, only a little bit teasing. “But just to make sure…” She placed a hand on Jey’s arm, her touch half-phantasmal in the new reality of the drug. “Will you be joining my Family?”   
“I’ve… I’ve got my own,” Jey stuttered, trying to force back the blush.

Faith smiled bitterly. “I never had that luxury.” The instant of sourness lifted away, replaced with serene happiness. “But family… family is made. Eden’s Gate protects its own. Isn’t that what matters? Won’t you accept it?”   
Jey touched Faith’s wrist, surprise tingling in the back of her mind when she was able to actually  _ feel  _ it. “Why are you…” She turned the other woman around, examining her face, ignoring the startled expression. “You’re…”

Something in those eyes…

“Your story about the drugs,” Jey said softly. “That wasn’t made up, was it?”

Faith didn’t have to respond for Jey to know that she’d been telling the truth. She continued, realization after realization clicking into each other. “You wanted a family, you joined the cult. You wanted safety, you got whatever this is. You wanted sober, now you’re on different drugs.”

Faith stepped back, her arms crossing defensively. “This is my life.”   
“It doesn’t have to be.”

Faith remained silent, face petulant- almost childish- and Jey sighed. “Come on. I didn’t get this chance with John, and look where it got him. I don’t want to kill anyone, Faith, and this- I don’t know what exactly it is that you wanted, but this isn’t it.”

“This is more than just me,” Faith retorted. “This isn’t about what I want. This is the will of the Father. This is my purpose.”

“I can help you,” Jey said, tone more fierce than she had intended it. But unlike John… this girl she understood. She could understand what brought her to that place, and Faith… Faith wasn’t cold-blooded. Manipulative, maybe, but she hadn’t done anything monstrous.

Not yet, at least.

Faith smiled at her, eyes gaining that distant, oracular look again. “And I can save you, Deputy.”

Jey felt something rise in her then, a pain stronger than anything she had known before. Stronger than anything she had felt for John. Stronger than everything else in her heart.

Some kind of empathy.

Jey hadn’t known the kind of loneliness that would drive someone to Faith’s ends. She hadn’t known many hardships in her life at all. But she understood them. She knew what they could do. She’d seen it firsthand in her friends, in the wealth that made her parents grow cold to each other, in small observations made passing by strangers.

Something like this… 

Was it any wonder that a broken, isolated girl would turn to  _ this  _ for help?

The temptation to reach out, to hug or touch or comfort Faith, was violent, and Jey restrained it with everything she had. “I don’t need to be saved.”

“You want to protect me,” Faith said, her voice lilted. “You’re sweet. In your own way.”

“Faith…” Jey trailed off, caught up again in the details of her face. “I… I saw this with John. You were alone. You were scared, I- I understand that. Do you really think Joseph cares about you? All he’s done is use you.”

“He showed me a new life,” Faith answered sharply. For the second time that day, the manufactured innocence in her face dropped away, revealing something else. Human, vulnerable…

Scared.

“It doesn’t matter what he does to me,” Faith continued, her hands clenching at the hem of her skirt. “He is the only thing that matters. John left us. John doesn’t matter anymore.” Her voice broke toward the end.

A moment passed in silence. Faith regained her composure, breathing deeply.

“If you want to understand me,” she finally said, reaching out to touch Jey’s cheek softly, “then  _ understand me.  _ I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but you’re  _ not. _ Listen to me. Just… listen.” A delicate smile bloomed across her face. “All we want to do is help people. Our Father knows how to help them best, and those who say otherwise aren’t just hurting us, they’re hurting  _ everyone.  _ This isn’t about doing what people want. This is about doing what they need.”

Jey took a long, analytical look at Faith’s composed expression. She was the cult. No matter what Jey asked, she always identified as the cult. Just as a facet of it- as the face of salvation. An angel to Joseph’s God. His inferior.

“And what about you?” Jey asked, as her surroundings grew pale and lost their tinges of surrealism. “Under all of this, who are  _ you,  _ Faith?”   
A look of shock, and confusion, and bewildered incredulity took over the woman’s face.

And Jey’s vision went black once again.

 


	14. Chapter 14

Without a doubt, Virgil Minkler was one of the best men that Jey had ever met.

He was unassuming, sure, but his modest appearance hid the courage of a lion and the heart of a saint. He was more grateful to her for doing the simple act of cleaning out the water supply than anyone else had been for any of the larger things she’d done. Upon meeting him, even Jess had been somewhat softer than she normally was. Virgil didn’t quite remind Jey of her father- where her father had been distant, well-groomed, and somewhat unfriendly, Virgil was a squat, trusting man with a face that inspired some kind of warmth. Virgil was the kind of man who would probably go to his kid’s baseball games- he’d even named his resistance, the Henbane resistance, after the Hope County baseball team, for goodness’ sake- and go out for ice cream with them afterward.

In short, Virgil was the kind of man that Jey wished she’d grown up with. Something about him inspired an instinct in her to protect him as best she could- to preserve him for the world, so that he could keep making it better.

To be honest, she would do just about anything for him. It had been no more than a few days in the Henbane, and she would already do anything for him.

As for Whitehorse, he’d always been kind enough to Jey; around the station, back when life had been relatively normal, he’d been the Office Dad, responsible and just shy of strict with his deputies. Even though she felt less of a protective imperative toward him, he’d more than earned her loyalty, and his stalwart defense of the jail was something that Jey couldn’t help but support.

Between the two of them, she never stood a chance in trying to refuse the wild goose chase they had decided to send her on.

All of her “But, Virgil”s and “Sheriff”s had been cut off by Virgil’s earnest eyes, or Whitehorse shaking his head and telling her the same thing over and over again: “We have to try.”

According to them- to the Cougar scouts- the impossible had happened. From the endless haze of the Bliss, from the realm of the Siren, from the half-reality of Faith Seed’s world, Marshal Burke had been released. God knew where he was. The scout who had first seen him had immediately rushed back to the jail, and by the time another party had been deployed, he was long gone.

So now, Jey was in a bright red ATV, Boomer dozing in the back seat and Jess seated next to her, plowing through precarious paths along mountain ridges, with only the moon to light her way.

Jey’s eyelids had been heavy for the past hour or so, but she couldn’t give up now. Given what the Bliss did to people, the Marshal would inevitably find his way back to it. They couldn’t let that happen. Jey might have never cared for him, but he was still a member of the team, and so saving him was a matter of principle. Her feelings didn’t matter.

That was a lesson she was learning fast.

The ATV slammed into a rock, violently jolting the car. A thrill of adrenaline snapped Jey back to staring at the road. In the back seat, Boomer let out a soft woof, apparently still dreaming. 

“Wh…” Jess stirred beside her, stretching out her arms. “What the fuck was that?”   
“Sorry. Tired,” Jey sighed.

Jess shifted in her seat. “I can drive, if you want.”

“Can’t. If you find him, the Marshal won’t recognize you. I have to be awake.”

“Yeah? And what if he starts shooting? Think you’ll be able to defend yourself if you’re asleep on your feet?” Jess unbuckled her seat belt. “Get out of the fucking driver’s seat.”   
“Jess-”

Today was just a day for broken sentences, wasn’t it? Jess interrupted her with a quick, sharp retort. “I said get out of the fucking driver’s seat, Jey.”

Jey whined in protest, but slid out from underneath her seatbelt, clumsily making her way into the passenger’s seat as Jess got into the driver’s side.

She tried to stay awake, she really did. But with the vibrations of the road under the ATV, and the darkness outside, and the heavy fatigue that had been lingering on her shoulder for hours now, it was only moments before Jey fell fast asleep.

\--

She woke up as the sun crested over the horizon. Jess remained behind the wheel, expression unchanged. “You doing okay?” Jey asked, her voice rough, groggy from sleep.

“Fine,” Jess answered, not removing her eyes from the road. “Haven’t run into your boy yet.”

Jey looked around. Under morning light, the Henbane River’s pastel green hues glimmered like a hazy painting, the softly rolling hills in the distance eerie in a manner entirely unlike the Holland Valley’s picturesque landscape.

Jey let herself have a few more moments of mindlessness, watching the landscape pass her by, the fog of sleepiness clearing from the crevices of her mind.

A shape appeared in the distance; something flesh-colored, humanoid, but distinctly  _ not human,  _ staggering in the direction of their vehicle.

They drew closer to it. Pale, unseeing green eyes pierced Jey’s, and the creature let out a crazed howl, breaking into an unsteady run. Jey scrambled for her pistol. “What the hell is that thing?”   
“Kill it!” Jess returned, accelerating. “Just kill it!”

Jey fired, hitting it in the knee, only for it to get back up and rush the car.

“In the head!” Jess yelled.

“Are we in a zombie movie? Oh, God-” Jey got lucky, landing a bullet perfectly between its eyes, and it fell to the ground.

She collapsed back into her seat, squeezing her eyes closed.

“Nice shot,” Jess said.

Jey sighed. “How are you so calm? What was that thing?”   
“Angel,” Jess answered, turning smoothly around a curve in the road. “People who get so high on the Bliss for so long that they just… turn into something that’s not human anymore. Faith makes ‘em here, they get shipped out to help fight for the cult. It’s pretty fuckin’ twisted, if you ask me.”

“Yeah.” Jey shuddered. She’d been trying to give Faith the benefit of the doubt, but…

Could someone who did things like that really be redeemable?

“Wait- Jess. These Angels… We don’t know where the Marshal is, but he was probably in the Bliss, right?”   
Jess froze on the wheel. “ _ Shit. _ ”

“We have to find him. Give me back the wheel.” 

They changed places silently.

As Jey was getting back into the driver’s side, a flash of green mist drew her eye to the east, where white flowers waved in the wind.

“Jess. Is that a Bliss field?” Jey poked her companion in the arm.

“Looks that way. You think he’s there?”

“It’s as good a place as any.” The asphalt road turned to bumpy dirt as she drove toward the field, and the strange, hallucinatory colors and sounds of the Bliss came into existence as they entered the field.

The whisper of a breeze came into Jey’s ear, and she turned, on instinct, searching for a body in the flowers.

A note. And next to it, a man.

A man in a Marshal’s uniform.

Jey read the note. In a soft, swirling script, it read quite simply:  _ A peace offering. _

“Jess!” she called.

“Yeah?” Jess replied from the other end of the field.

Jey tucked the note into a pocket and hoisted Marshal Burke out of the field. “I found him!”


	15. Chapter 15

The Marshal’s recovery was violent. They dragged him kicking, screaming and biting out of the Bliss; his eyes glazed with green, hands twitching, chest shivering with every breath.

Some peace offering.

Tracey- that angry girl who was practically joined at the hip with Virgil- was the one who took care of most of the medicine. She was tough. But the Marshal was vicious, lashing out at anyone who tried to help him. Jey could see it in his eyes. He wanted nothing, nothing more than to go back to whatever the Bliss had given him. The Marshal hadn’t been a happy man. That made him easy for something like the cult to manipulate.

The word  _ angel  _ was whispered around him. His eyes did, occasionally, flash that hazy green. But people had hope. They hoped, because they needed  _ something  _ to keep them from the dark.

Whitehorse wasn’t asking questions. Jey, on the other hand, fully intended to.

Only she wasn’t going to ask the Marshal. He was barely capable of speech at the moment, and anyway, he had never been a sparkling conversationalist. No, she’d leave him for Whitehorse, Tracey, and Virgil to deal with.

She was going to the source.

Jess wouldn’t approve of the method Jey had decided on. That’s why she hadn’t told her.

Under any other circumstance, this little rendezvous that Jey had arranged would be something delightful. Under any other circumstance, sneaking out to meet a girl at night would be something that she would look forward to with a sparkle in her eye, not a heavy sense of duty.

Sure, there was something pleasant about it. Faith inspired something in Jey that was a little more than pity and a little less than fascination. Something that fell just about in the ballpark of attraction.

Jess didn’t sleep well, but she did have to sleep. When the huntress was- well, not quite  _ peaceful,  _ but at least unconscious- Jey eased open a window of the jail (funny, how they were staying inside jail for safety) and slipped out as quietly as she could, giving Boomer a calming pat as he sat up and whined at the sight of her leaving.

She didn’t like the Henbane. She didn’t like the misty, surreal half-realities of it. It was only a short distance from John’s Holland Valley, yet it felt a whole dimension different. Where the Valley could be on the back of a postcard, the Henbane was like a barely realized dream. 

The Bliss fields were easily visible. They were also everywhere. That wasn’t exactly a good thing, seeing as the drug was one of the cult’s main assets, but for Jey’s purposes right now, it was perfect.

The flowers were pretty. Some drug, to be so potent that its effects could be felt from the raw material alone.

Jey sat in the field, the moon glittering above her in illusory reds and greens and whites. She breathed out and fired a single shot above her head.

Two cultists appeared. Jey dropped her gun and kicked it to them, smiling her most innocent smile. “I need to bust a nuttalk to Faith.”

They looked at each other, and one nodded to her. Then the grip of a pistol slammed into her head, and Jey’s vision went black.

\--

“What are you doing here?” Faith’s voice was almost unfriendly and almost a laugh. “I didn’t call you.”

“You didn’t,” Jey agreed. “I needed to see you.”

“Have you accepted us?” Faith’s hand glided over Jey’s, the contact bringing forth a tiny thrill up Jey’s spine.

Jey disregarded it. “Look, Faith, I’m not talking to the cult. I’m talking to  _ you.  _ You. Faith Seed. Singular. You’re just yourself. There’s no ‘us’ involved in this.”

Faith quirked her head. “Then have you accepted  _ me,  _ Deputy? Is that why you’re here?”   
Jey shook her head.

“...Oh.” Faith smiled brightly. “This is about my gift.”

Jey sighed. “No. No, it isn’t. Although I have… questions… about that too, that’s for some other time.”

“Then why are you here?” Her voice held such soft notes of curiosity that an involuntary spark of warmth ignited in Jey’s chest. How had she doubted Faith?

She remembered the blank, lost, enraged face of the Angel. She remembered the haze of green that haunted her dreams. The question answered itself, and there were no more questions after it.

No more manipulation. Jey knew what she had to ask. She wouldn’t be charmed into forgetting that monstrosity’s face, no matter how beautiful and enchanting and ethereal its creator was. “Faith… why do you do this? You want me to think that you’re a victim. And I- I think you are. To some extent, at least. But that thing’s eyes… The way it screamed, I-”

Faith shook her head. “It isn’t like that, Deputy. My Angels are-”

_ “Don’t say sacred, _ ” Jey snapped, turning around and glaring at the woman. “I know sacred, and  _ that wasn’t it. _ ”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Faith shot right back. “I- I can’t explain it. I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

“Do you think this is the way to-” Jey’s words stopped coming in an instant, halted by the flash of an emotion in Faith’s green eyes.

An emotion that made everything else click into place.

_ Fear. _

“I belong to the Father,” Faith said, her voice too high, too thin, too panicked. “I belong to Eden’s Gate.”

“You belong to no one,” Jey responded. “Least of all Joseph. Stop making the Angels, Faith. I can… I can take you with me. I can take you out of here.” She reached forward, taking Faith’s wrist in her hand, looking into her eyes with a ferocity that she couldn’t tame. “Come with me.”

“I can’t.” Faith’s voice was barely above a whisper. “I can’t control what my Priestesses do, I can’t turn against Joseph, I can’t follow you.” A tiny, barely perceptible shiver ran through her arm, and Jey found herself running her thumb over Faith’s hand, trying to comfort her. “Do you know what he’d do to me?”

The response, the violent surge of a protective instinct, reared in Jey’s chest, and words escaped from the center of fire in her chest before she even willed them to. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”

Her heart had always been a little too readily given away. Jey knew, subconsciously, below layers of logic and loyalty, that she was all too willing to do anything in her power to save the woman she’d only just met- the woman who should, by all accounts, by all reasoning, be her enemy.

Faith’s eyes held a few too many highlights. Something new, a half-born tear, caught and refracted the mysteriously green light of wherever they were standing. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Reality expanded back into Jey’s mind, total blackness pouring like a gush of oil over her vision, and the last breath of her consciousness was just enough to note that she was still holding Faith.

\--

“...the  _ fuck  _ was she thinking? I swear to fucking God, if this happens  _ one more time,  _ I’ll-”

“Easy, kid. Easy.”

Jess’s voice was rougher than usual, full of a vengeant rage that almost made Jey afraid to open her eyes. Whitehorse’s words, on the other hand, had only a hint of worry in them; he never was one to show his feelings.

Jess fell into a simmering silence, and Jey hesitantly cracked open one eyelid. Immediately, a stinging slap tore across her face, leaving a lasting, needling impression. “What the  _ FUCK  _ were you thinking, you fuckin’ moron? How the fuck do you think I felt waking up and seeing you gone? You fucking idiot!” Jess yelled. “Do you  _ know  _ how worried I was? For fuck’s sake!”

Jey groaned, rubbing her face.

Whitehorse patted Jess’s shoulder. “Okay, kid. She gets it. Take a seat.” 

Jess sat down, fuming.

Jey sat up on the bed. “Hey, Whitehorse.”

“Don’t you pull that with me,” the Sheriff said sternly, arms crossed and brow furrowed. “You gave me and Virgil quite a fright there. Care to explain yourself?”

“No, not really,” Jey answered, glancing at the ground. “It was just something that had to be done. No details needed.”   
“We can’t afford secrets, Rookie,” Whitehorse chastised her.

“Is she awake?” A new voice interrupted Jey as she formed a response. Virgil stepped into the room, his face lined with a worry that lifted as he noticed her consciousness. “Oh, Deputy! What happened?”   
“I…” Jey sighed, wringing her hands. “I can’t explain. Not yet. It was just… I had questions. And I needed them answered. That’s all it was.”

“Like fuck it was,” Jess snapped from the chair. “I bet you just wanted to see your fuckin’-”

_ “Jess. _ ” Jey interrupted her, shooting her a warning glance. She turned her gaze to Virgil, softening, a calm conviction filling her chest. “Virgil, I know you need me here. But there's something I have to do. Back in Holland Valley. I won't be long, I promise, but-” Her voice broke. “I need to see someone.”

“Sure, Deputy. Whatever you need. Just be back as soon as you can.”

Tracey called Virgil’s name from the other room, and he hurried away.

Jess got up. “Why are we going to the Valley?”   
Jey’s heart twinged, but she shook her head, getting out of the bed. “No, Jess. Just me. You stay here. I’ll be back before you know it.”

Jess stayed standing, checking her bowstring. “No way in hell are we splitting up now.”

“Jess-”

Jess raised her hand and interrupted Jey. “I don’t give a shit. I’m coming with you.”

“...Fine. Let’s go.”

\--

The car ride to Fall’s End was cold, Jess silent in the passenger seat, Jey’s eyes fixed on the road. The smallness of Hope County continually amazed her. Holland Valley and the Henbane were two very different worlds, but they were only a short car ride apart from each other.

It felt like years since she had seen these picturesque landscapes, the rolling green hills and the cloudless blue sky. But really, how long had it been? A week? Maybe two?

Time was beginning to lose meaning.

“Land ahoy,” Jess said dryly. “We’re going to the Spread Eagle, I’m guessing?”

Jey nodded, pulling into the dusty parking spot next to the bar. Mary May stood at the edge of the porch.

Jess rolled down her window. “Hey, Mare.”

“Jess!” Mary May smiled. “You two here for something?”   
Jey hopped out of the car, and Jess followed, making a beeline for the barkeep. “Is he upstairs?” Jey asked in an undertone.

Mary May sighed. “I can’t imagine why you’d want to see the son of a bitch, but yeah. Want me to send someone to make sure he doesn’t-” She caught sight of Jey’s handgun. “Guess not.”

“Thanks, Mary May.” Jey looked between her and Jess. “You girls have fun.”

Jess turned red, letting out an indignant noise, but Jey was already up the stairs.

“Hey, Baptist,” she said softly, opening the door. “You in here?”

“Where else would I be,  _ Deputy? _ ” he responded in a growl.

“I guess I did put you on house arrest,” Jey admitted, her voice tighter than she wanted it. “I have to ask you something. About… About Faith.”

“You like her, don’t you?” John said, voice needling. “Haven’t you heard? Don’t trust a thing that woman says.”

“She’s your sister.”

“Only in name,” he answered. “Why should I even talk to you?”

“I spared your life,” Jey retorted. “I showed you mercy.”

“You should have killed me.” There was no thankfulness in that voice; all there was was cold, unbending, hollow anger.

“You know,” she said, fingering her gun, “I really should have. Luckily for you, I have morals. Unlike  _ some  _ people I could mention.” 

John exhaled sharply. “What do you want?”   
“How did she get to the cult?” Jey asked, the question burning up in her lungs. “What happened to her?”   
He waited a good, long moment before answering. “Faith was… a troubled youth. She joined us to find a family, and Joseph took a…  _ special interest  _ in her.”

Jey shuddered. “You mean…?”   
“He set his sights on making her the new Faith.”

“The new Faith? You mean there were others?” Jey said, eyes wide.

John nodded with a low chuckle. “To be honest, I’ve lost track of how many women have come and gone from that role now- and it took very little to get her to comply. We have resources that she was rather  _ partial  _ to.”

Jey shivered. “Do you think I can help her?”

John gave her a cursory glance. “Have you been to the Jessop Conservatory?”   
She shook her head silently.

“Do you know what it’s like to be addicted to something?”   
She shook her head again.

John laughed bitterly. “Then you have no hope of understanding her.” He examined Jey’s face with blue eyes that seemed to see and pierce everything, and shook his head in resignation. “You can’t know Faith until you know pain, Deputy. Everything she did- everything she  _ became-  _ it all leads back to that.”

Jey turned to leave, but John’s voice stopped her in her tracks. “Please-”

She didn’t look back, but stayed still, waiting to hear what he had to say.

John sighed. “I can never be entirely cleansed of my sins. Neither can Faith. But… there’s something in her, Deputy. I…” He trailed off for a moment before continuing in a softer voice. “I think she can be… human again.”

“Thank you, John,” Jey said, her hand lingering on the doorframe. “I’ll do what I can for her.”

“Will you come back?” His voice, controlled, disinterested, still held a note of loneliness.   
Jey laughed under her breath. “I think I will.”

Her chest was lighter when she descended the stairs, and when she hugged Mary May goodbye, she made sure to give her a few teasing words just for good measure.

Jess noticed the difference in her. For all her coarseness, Jess noticed everything.

The sky was slightly bluer as they drove across the bridge.


	16. Chapter 16

For the most part, life returned to normalcy. Jess didn’t ask what Jey and John had spoken about, and Jey didn’t offer to tell her. They instead sat in a comfortable, loose conversation, listening to the music of the cult and poking fun at it. They were pretty songs, if you took out all of the associations. The drive to the Hope County Jail was relaxed, and with the number of cult trucks on the road drastically reduced, it was the closest thing to Jey’s old life that she had yet experienced.

She parked the truck neatly in front of the jail and hopped out. As always, Jess followed her with dead-silent footsteps, and the only indication Jey had of her presence was the opening and shutting of the back door to let Boomer out of the car. He stretched, then bounded into the jail, spinning around in energetic circles. Jey laughed. “Missed the open air, buddy?”   
He barked and wagged his tail, then sped away and back again a few more times before launching himself at Jess and slamming her into the ground, covering her face with licks. “Fuck! Fuckin’ dog!” Jess scrambled to get out from under him, but after a few moments went limp. “Get this fucking thing off of me!”

“Boomer!” Jey called through breathless laughter. “Here, boy!”   
He cocked his head and ran to Jey instead, wagging his tail when she scratched behind his ears. Jess groaned and sat up. “Why do we take that fuckin’ thing anywhere?”

“Aww, he’s not so bad,” Jey said, kneeling down to give the dog a good scratching. He rolled over, happily panting, and she rubbed his belly. “See? All he wants is love.”

“Well, he’s lookin’ in the wrong fucking place,” Jess mumbled, brushing herself off. “Come on, I thought you said there was someone you had to meet.”

Jey’s smile faded. “Yeah. I did.”

The air went still for a moment, and Jey cleared her throat. “Uh, can you watch Boomer? I’ll be right back.”

“Me? Watch the dog? I’d rather fuckin’-” Jess’s eyes met with Jey’s wide, pleading ones, and she let out a sigh that seemed to emanate  from the depths of her being. “...Fine.”

Jey smiled quietly. “Thanks.”

It took a bit of looking to find Tracey. Especially since Jey wasn’t ready to talk to anyone else, so she took the long and surreptitious way. But eventually, there she was; standing under an eave in the desolate gray of the jail, a trail of smoke spiraling into the air from the end of a half-burned cigarette. 

“Hey, Tracey,” Jey said quietly.

The woman didn’t turn to look at her, but dropped her cigarette on the ground and crushed it under her foot. “Hey, Deputy.”

“Can I, uh…” Jey hesitated, shifting on her feet. “Can I talk to you?”

“Aren’t you already?” Tracey continued avoiding her gaze, folding her arms across her chest. “Look, Deputy. I know why you’re here. We all know where you went last night. I've seen the way you look after you come out of the Bliss- for fuck's sake, I hear how you  _ talk  _ about her. You're not subtle. And if you're expecting me to tell you how Faith is just some beautiful little angel just waiting to be redeemed, then I've got some bad news for you.”

Jey only watched her in fascination as she continued. “Faith went to the cult of her own accord. Some of that was because of the drugs, but if she's tried to tell you that she's a victim and a victim alone, she's lying.”

“But she-”

Tracey cut her off with a wave of her hand. “Faith was my best friend. Before she was even Faith, I knew her. Her name was Rachel Jessop, and she was a wild girl. Full of spirit. Cult broke her before she even graduated high school, and she turned into what you know today. Lost all that fighting spirit in exchange for purity. Well… she's not really pure. The  _ appearance  _ of purity, I guess. That's what good old Joseph gets off to, or so I've heard.”

Jey shivered. “So I can't help her.”

“That's what I'd say. Don't get me wrong, you're good at what you do, but saving the soul of a fucking sociopath was never in the job description.” Tracey glanced at Jey, and laughed sharply, her face unforgiving and contemptuous. “Don’t play with fire, kid. She looks harmless, but Faith won’t hesitate to kill you and everyone you hold dear.”

Jey turned silently and left the jail. She didn’t say a word to Jess as she passed her, and the huntress and the dog seemed to understand, tagging along behind her unbidden.

Jess waited until she was in the passenger seat of the truck to make a comment. “What the fuck did she say to you?”

“She told me to leave Faith alone,” Jey said, just above a whisper. Hearing the words in her own voice made them real. Heat swelled behind her eyes. “She said I couldn’t save her.”

“Well, that seems pretty- I mean, why don’t you?” Jess asked absently.

Jey let out an undignified sob. “I don’t- I don’t  _ know!  _ Jess, I can’t. I  _ can’t.  _ I can’t just  _ leave  _ her.”

Jess startled at the sudden outburst, tentatively reaching for Jey’s shaking shoulders. “Why not?”   
“Because I-” Jey’s impassioned voice broke at the start of her new sentence. The world slowed to a crawl, then fully stopped. Jey went silent, and the tears on her cheeks felt… cold, exposed, as though she were teetering on the edge of a cliff taller than anything she’d ever known. “Oh.”

When had this happened?

It wasn’t love. Jey knew what love was like, and this was… less than that. This was  _ want,  _ most chiefly, but also protectiveness, and affection, and something strong, a chain around her neck that pulled her constantly to the Bliss. To Faith.

Why her?

Jey had never really… come so close to love. She knew, if she let this attachment-  _ whatever  _ this was- continue, it would turn into love. So that meant she was  _ falling  _ in love. That was the name of this feeling.

_ “Oh, _ ” Jey said again, voice overwhelmed, throat tight.

“Oh,  _ no, _ ” Jess mumbled. “Oh,  _ fuck. _ She’s got you, doesn’t she?”   
_ “Fuck,”  _ Jey agreed.

Boomer barked from the back seat, and Jess turned to look at him. “Watch your language, young man.”

Jey’s remaining tears dissolved in a laugh. The moment, whatever it had been made of, was gone.

But again, she was compelled to go. To see the woman who had captured her. 

Jess knew her intention; Jey could see the understanding, and the worry, in her face. She didn’t mention it.

Jess knew better than to stop her.

\--

The Bliss field near the jail was a blessing and a curse. The Peggies at the field had seemed like they’d expected her, this time. She was getting used to this altered consciousness.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Faith said, her voice an ethereal echo in this dreamlike plane. She wasn’t angry, at least not by the sound of it. Instead, she seemed worried.

Like she actually cared.

“You can’t keep coming like this,” Faith insisted, pulling Jey’s face into her hands with an inscrutable expression.

Jey reached up, taking Faith’s wrist in her hand and running her thumb over it. “I’ll stop coming when you come with me.”

“We’ve been over this,” Faith said with a soft laugh. “I can’t.”

“Then whatever this will do to me, I’m here. I’ll stay. I’ll come back every day.” Jey’s heart pounded against her ribs, its impacts light and fluttering. “I’m  _ not  _ leaving you. I’m not  _ ever  _ leaving you.”

Faith’s eyes widened, and her face flushed pink, right up to the ears. “But…” She fell silent, and then, softly, softer than Jey had ever heard her: “What if I did come with you? What then?”   
“Then… Then you’d  _ live.  _ And I’d live with you. You can be forgiven.” Jey’s breath was quick now, the thrill of everything bearing down upon her.

Faith drew marginally closer, her eyes full of a suppressed heat, and then, suddenly, an overpowering sadness. “Maybe if I’d had someone like you… Maybe none of this would have happened.”

Jey couldn’t respond. The moment was too full of light and green and gaze and heartbeat.

The heat drove out the sadness in Faith’s expression, and she smiled almost shyly. “Can I… Can I kiss you?”   
Jey nodded wordlessly, and the next moment, they were pressed together. Jey’s hands came to rest on Faith’s waist, and in the mist of the world of the Bliss, she had never felt anything so sweet.

The kiss grew. Faith pulled her closer, as though she were her only lifeline; in Jey, the passion of Faith’s movements doubled. They broke apart and came back together, again and again, until white took over Jey’s vision, and everything was lost to her- everything but the tingling, ghostly remembrance of the softness in Faith’s lips.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...And we're back up to speed, everyone.

Jey didn’t wake up in the jail that time. Instead, when she opened her eyes, she was still in the Bliss field where she had come to Faith, Jess’s presence lingering, dark and seething, in her peripheral vision.

Guess she hadn’t stayed understanding.

“Why’d you do it again?” the huntress growled, face twisted into something between rage and terror. “You keep going into the Bliss, and you’ll turn into a fuckin’ Angel, Jey! We’re fucked without you! You ever think about that?”

Jey looked down at her hands, at the tremors running through them, and let out a sharp breath. “Jess, I- I can’t hurt her.”

“What happened?” Jess demanded, dragging Jey to her feet.  _ “What the fuck did she do to you?” _

Jey pushed Jess off of her, not missing the hurt that flashed through Jess’s eyes at the cold gesture. Her heart still slammed and flickered restlessly against her chest, her breath coming in shallow, star-struck whispers. “I… It was nothing, Jess, it was just…” She shivered, the feeling of Faith pressed against her rushing like a drug through her system. “We just kissed.”

_ “Jey.”  _ Jess stared at her, her grip on Jey’s arm going slack. “You… She’s… She’s our  _ enemy! _ ”

“She doesn’t  _ have  _ to be!” Jey retorted, more fire in her tone than she’d thought she could summon. “Jess, I don’t- I don’t know her story, not exactly, but she isn’t like the others.”

“Why? Because she’s beautiful? Jey, look-” Jess grasped her shoulders, staring into her soul. “Look at me. You  _ can’t  _ let that affect you.”

“I’m  _ not!”  _ Jey tore herself away from her friend. “I’m just saying that maybe she deserves a second chance.”   
Jess deflated, sighing deeply, and dropped her arms to her sides. “Virgil’s been asking where you are. The Cougars located another Bliss supply. We’re supposed to blow it to shit. You know, the usual.”

Jey started to make a protest, but Jess held up a hand to silence her. “And if that makes Faith finally blow her lid, so fuckin’ be it. Your duty is to the Resistance.  _ Not  _ to her.”

“...Fine,” Jey sighed. “But you’re driving.”

She tossed the keys to the truck in a high arc toward Jess, and the huntress caught them easily, grinning. “Fine with me.”

\--

Having Jess drive was a very bad decision. She must have run into every single pothole in the road, laughing every time the car jolted so violently that Jey felt her soul leave her body. It was probably more dangerous than any cult-related activity they could have undertaken.

But she got there. That was the goal. Jey knew she wouldn’t be able to attack Faith, not directly- she wouldn’t have been able to drive, not without a thousand detours and distractions. Jey couldn’t even think about what attacking the Bliss might do to her relationship with Faith. Jess thought she’d been manipulated, Jey thought she had a crush. God knew who was right.

Oh, the Bliss; oh, the Bliss would set her free. Who knew what she’d be free of, but… free, nonetheless. Maybe the cult had something with that nonsense. Huge containers, the same sickly green of the drug, surrounded a field of the raw drug, guarded by Peggies on every side.

Jess pulled up a hundred meters away, and they sprinted through the woods together, the communication between them both silent and seamless. When had this become normal?

When had it become routine to take hostages for the Resistance after shooting out their kneecaps? 

Jey turned around, knocking another Peggie down with the handle of her gun. From the safety of stealth, Jess took out another; Jey kept trying to tell her not to aim for the head, to leave them alive, but honestly, she’d grown used to half fatalities and half injuries in their missions. The outpost went down in just minutes.

Jey positioned herself on the roof, holding an RPG and aiming it, one eye squinted shut, at the mountain of containers. Adrenaline thrilled through her veins. Who cared what Faith would do? Jess was right; the Bliss was an evil thing, and anyone so connected with it had to be-

She released the RPG, and the Bliss went up in flames. Jey suddenly felt everything again; their bodies pressed together, Faith’s soft, enchanting words.

She tried to shake the sensations off. “Let’s head back to the jail.”

Jess spun the keys around her finger. “Nice work, Dep.”

“Try not to get us killed,” Jey said, landing not-so-gracefully on the ground. “Please?”   
“I’ll do what I can.”

\--

Virgil was overwhelmingly happy when he heard that they had taken the supply out. Whitehorse was less open about it, but made up for it in pride, pulling Jey aside to tell her how well she had done. How far she had come, since the day he’d taken her on as a rookie. A pat on the head from Whitehorse, and Jey was bubbling with so much pride in herself that she could almost forget about the events of last night. A thankful word from Virgil, and she felt unbearably light, sweeping him into a hug that was far too tight for a man of his age. No one said a good old-fashioned  _ thank you  _ anymore.

The night came, and with it came dreams. Dreams that shifted, shifted, became more and more tangible, until finally…

Finally…

“I thought we were building trust… I thought you would be different.” Her voice, so bitter. Her voice, so sweet. “I gave you everything I could, and you couldn’t have just  _ waited! _ ”

Faith spun around, locking eyes with Jey, her expression practically animalistic with wide-eyed, gasping terror. “Do you know what he’ll  _ do  _ to me? Do you know what  _ you’ve done? _ ”

She shivered, taking a step forward. “You say you care, but you’re lying. Violence is the only language you speak.”

In front of Jey, as she stood, unable to move, in the Bliss, a table materialized, and two men, up late playing cards.

Virgil… and the Marshal.

Faith placed her hand over the Marshal’s, guiding it to his holster. “So I… will speak… your language.”

She hesitated before pulling out his gun. “I wish… I wish things had been different. But I don’t have a choice.” 

The next seconds happened in a blur. A whispered  _ I’m sorry,  _ a gunshot, a pool of blood.

Jey woke up with a gasp, to Tracey shaking her. “Deputy?”

The woman’s cheeks were stained with tears.

Jey’s eyes went wide. “Virgil?”   
Tracey looked down at her hands, and Jey followed her gaze.

Blood.

Blood and a Cougar pin.

Tears welled up in Jey’s eyes. He couldn’t really be gone, right? Faith wouldn’t…

Faith wouldn’t… would she?

“You get that bitch,” Tracey said, fighting back tears. “You get that bitch, and  _ you kill her,  _ Deputy _. _ ”


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and here's where the horrible thing happens!

Total chaos reigned in the jail, every member of the Cougars convinced that they could turn on each other in an instant- just as the Marshal had turned on sweet old Virgil- but Jey heard none of it. All she heard was the echoing cries of a scared girl.  _ “I don’t have a choice.” _

What had Jey been trying to do?

Had she ever thought she could make a difference?

She should have listened.

_ “I don’t have a choice.” _

Well, choice or not, Faith had done what she’d done. Now it was Jey’s turn.

The ghost of a pair of lips came across her own. A mockery.

She had to avenge.

Jey stepped outside of the jail, and immediately, an arrow pierced her leg. Her vision went white.

Time for the finale.

\--

A green gate creaked open in front of her. Jey picked herself up, her heart a numbing presence in the bottom of her stomach, and moved.

_ “Now you see what we can do…”  _ Faith’s voice echoed, ghostlike and sultry, in the distance. Jey pursued.

The flowers under her feet crushed. A beacon rose from the middle of a lake.

Jey pursued.

Reality shifted.

Instead of butterflies, Jey’s stomach filled with heat and rage the moment she saw Faith’s figure, leading a giddy Whitehorse across the field of Bliss.

Her voice was innocent.

She was anything but.

Whitehorse picked up the song. Jey reached to grasp his arm, to pull him out of this hell that looked like heaven, but Faith shoved her back bodily, staring into her with eyes full of ice. “He was the one who kept you from me. But now, he understands, and he’ll join us in Eden.” All of the sweetness in her voice was gone, replaced by a vicious honesty.  “And if you try to stop him…” 

She let out a laugh and disappeared.

Whitehorse did, too.

The next moment, Jey was in an arena of open meadow and hazy Bliss, Faith’s voice everywhere, Faith’s body an apparition in the drug. 

“Your Sheriff was a wall,” Faith said, her voice shaking the ground. “A wall that kept you from the Father. Kept you from seeing his truth.” 

The innocence was back.

“Damn it, Faith,” Jey whispered. Her voice didn’t carry.

She pulled out her gun, but hesitated to use it. Instead, when the first blow from Faith came, she dodged it, feeling the breath of something deadly against her cheek.

“He’s so close,” Faith goaded. “He’s so close to accepting the word of the Father. And when he does, he’ll never go back to you. There’s no coming back from the truth.”

A dozen Faiths sprang up around the arena.

_ “You find that bitch, and you kill her.” _

Jey raised the gun and fired a shot straight into Faith’s chest. But all it did was make her disappear.

No harm would be done to her; at least not now. She fired again and again. Apparition after apparition dissipated. And then she solidified into one again, firing projectile after projectile in Jey’s direction, her voice becoming panicked. “Why do you keep fighting us? You know what’s coming. The Father- the Father showed you-”

The anger boiled over. “I don’t give a shit about the Father, Faith! All I care about is you!”

Reality pulsed around her. Faith fell silent. Jey lowered the gun, aiming it as well as she could with tears blurring her vision, and shot her in leg. “All I cared about  _ was  _ you.”

And again, Faith was many. The fight raged on. Jey couldn’t think, so she shot. 

She was one, and she floated.

Jey kept firing until that voice came back.

And it was human.

Jey stopped in her tracks and raised her arms. “Faith.”

Another projectile brushed past her.

_ “Faith!”  _

Faith lowered slightly, startled by the anger behind the yell, and Jey took advantage of it, grasping her hand and pulling her down. “Why did you do it? You slaughtered them in cold blood. Why?”   
Faith was silent, but her hands stopped glowing green.

“He was a good man, Faith.” The tears behind Jey’s eyes boiled hot with rage and grief. “He was a good man, and you- you killed him for no reason.”

Faith pulled away from her, but remained grounded. “He was keeping you from the-”

“You never had a chance!” Jey laughed wildly. “You thought killing Virgil would get me to join your cult? I could never be a part of your ‘family’, Faith! I can’t live like a monster!  _ I can’t live like you!”  _

Faith drew back roughly. “You think I’m a monster?”

“What else could you be?”

Her voice got higher, more panicked. “You think I  _ wanted  _ this?”

And then it was soft again, shaking. “He threatened me. He plied me with drugs- I was seventeen- I was just a child-  _ none  _ of this was my fault!”

“It’s not your fault that you were in a bad situation when you were a kid,” Jey retorted. “What  _ is  _ your fault is that you murdered, lied, and drugged instead of fighting. You’re a coward.”

The unwelcome air of empathy filled her heart again. “Now  _ be brave.  _ Leave him. Make amends for what you’ve done.”

Faith paused for a long minute. “Even after all this… you…”

She glanced at her tattoo, a chemical formula stretching across her forearm. “Jey, I… I don’t know who I am.”

Jey fell silent this time.

Then Faith looked into her eyes, gaze numb and open. Her voice raised to heaven, soft and melodic. _ “I once was lost…” _

She took Jey’s hand, a pained smile on her face, as she squeezed it.  _ “But now, am found…” _

_ “Was blind…” _

The words came slow, agonizingly slow. .

_ “But now….” _

The next moments happened in snapshots, still images flashing across the surface of Jey’s consciousness.

Faith reached forward, grasping Jey’s belt. Faith found the handle of Jey’s gun. Faith raised it to her head.

_ “....I see.” _

A gunshot, and it was over.

Jey didn’t know who had screamed- her or Faith.

Either way, the reality faded, and Jey was alone in a Bliss field, tears staining her cheeks as she strained for breath.

Eventually, she closed her eyes.

Eventually, a pair of arms and a rough voice found her with a  _ Jey, Jey, is that you? _

She turned into Jess’s arms, sobbing, her mind still scrambling, gasping,  _ trying  _ to understand.

“I didn’t want this,” she whispered. “I- I never- I didn’t- She-”

Jess held Jey without question, until Jey reached up, and Jess took her hand, turning it over more gently than she had probably ever handled anything.

“...Jey, is this blood?”

Jey could only continue to sob.

_ I once was lost. _

_ But now am found. _

_ Was blind, _

_ But now _

_ I see. _

Gunshots, gunshots, gunshots.

Jey cried, practically unhinged, into Jess’s hoodie, until the stress and the exhaustion and the trauma blacked out her eyes. 


End file.
